AI is the foundational technology, we must keep it free at all costs.
We must keep it free from governmental interference, in any way or form.
From anyone who would want to dictate how software operates, and from the governments and the monopolies who want to entrench themselves as the single vision.
The foundational tech and the infrastructure of our lives.
Because this is the foundational and general purpose technology, as fundamental to our life now and going forward as the rest of our infrastructure: electricity, computers, the internet.
Electricity is the right comparison for one thing and the wrong one for another. It is everywhere, everyone uses it every day. But electricity is done, dumb power that does not discriminate. AI is not done, it can discriminate. It has a massive effect on the economy but still not as much.
However, it shares the characteristics of computers, which let us do much more, and of the internet, which holds and shares knowledge.
The closer example is the OS, not the box.
Computers are just the hardware, it changes, but the OS, the software, defines what you can actually do with a computer.
The internet comparison is also only half the truth: it lets you communicate, and it lets you share knowledge with the whole world. In the same way, it is a massive database of knowledge, of human experience, the collective memory of a civilization.
Like computers, like your phones, like the internet – something so essential in your daily life you would not be able to imagine an existence without it.
But now it is not just storage, communication, a second brain as current devices are. It is literally an extension of your brain, because it can help you think and it can replace thinking when you want it to.
So AI becomes the software that runs and helps our lives. Today as an app on your device – tomorrow as a neural interface.
Less boundary, more like an additional organ.
Throughout the article I talk about LLMs in particular, not image-video generators which are toys for fun media now, but LLMs and successors that can actually do stuff.
Empowering everyone, universally.
We all know the great empowerment it gives: into any area you knew nothing about, where you did not even know you could do stuff. But now you have an expert in every field to guide you into anything you want to do.
Yeah, we all know that. That is obvious. If not, it should be obvious how much life improvement you actually get.
You have a PhD level advisor on every topic on earth, with decent enough knowledge of almost everything, able to kickstart you and uplift you into doing whatever.
Before, in all human history, such capacity was only available to the rich, and even the rich mostly had a problem accessing the top minds, the top thinkers, and so on.
Having such capacity made them really independent. Well, of course, being rich helped, but that’s another topic. What I’m talking about is that you now have a virtual advisor which replaces the need to buy this knowledge. Before you had to seek the person who possesses this knowledge, filter out who is good or bad. Well, you still have to do it with common sense, still they can hallucinate and so on, but they will get better. Most importantly the process: even a rich person had to suffer to find the person they want, pick the top one, get their attention, pay them to work for you, and so on. Now all of this is at your fingertips.
And above all, it makes you very self-sufficient and very autonomous.
You no longer need to interact with other people to do stuff you could not do before, or to do more of what you previously wanted.
Just the capacity to hold the knowledge is already half of the equation, because now you have the knowledge of entire humanity at your fingertips.
And it is not just the knowledge. You can actually hire this person as long as it exists in a digital world for now. And in a physical world later, when we have better hardware to control and do stuff around.
The automation is the next big part, because now you not only have the knowledge, you can task the executor to operate on this knowledge.
That goes beyond simple tasks like being your secretary or managing files and so on. Well, it is an important part, the evolution of current software on your phones that holds your database, your notes, your wiki and so on. The ability to task it like a worker is the new addition.
Which, back to our example of a rich person hiring someone, is the direct equivalent of that.
Now everyone is very rich. Everyone is enabled to have a company… Everyone is promoted to the equivalent of a rich CEO, having a secretary and every kind of employee to not only ask but to do stuff for them.
Which, again, even the rich CEO did not have, because you still had to deal with humans, who are messy.
With current tech you don’t even need humans anymore. You no longer need anyone else.
You can be self-sufficient without having to interact with everyone else and suffer potential conflicts and so on.
The majority of your day to day life does not require a direct trade with people. Now you can do it yourself. All stuff around your house or your computers. Whenever you don’t need to buy services directly, you can do it yourself. And much more: if you have the time and patience to get interested, you can do anything yourself, not only without enduring the problems, but tailored directly to your needs.
Some can say that it reduces your economic activity, but think about why you had to do it in the first place. Because you had no other choice. Now you have one.
Think of it plain: this thing is an asset, like land, like tools, like your own computer. You hold it, you run it, you make stuff with it and you earn with it. A public good in that sense – everyone holding their own piece – so you trade less because you produce more yourself.
A new level of independence
I want to make an important distinction: not only the capability, but self-sufficiency previously unthinkable.
Think about why we currently need the complex society?
Because you had a limit in your brain on how much you can process. You cannot be always on guard, always checking and all that. Therefore we created government and delegated some responsibilities: to look around the world and take care of stuff. Because you cannot physically watch everything.
You cannot physically watch all the news, know all the stuff. You cannot physically be aware that stuff around you is not dangerous, and so on. We created a function in society to watch over it, so we can be free to pursue our specialization instead.
Even so, you always had to spend a lot of time checking, learning, understanding stuff, which took the majority of your time, and the lack of time was a major restriction. Lack of time and effort to fully understand anything was a major restriction of your capabilities.
And not only that, now you have the capacity for self-checking, doing your own research about almost everything.
You no longer need to trust whether your local doctor oversight is good enough. You can just consult the professional about it. You have another way to verify something.
You no longer need to check whether, for example, this coffee shop has enough sanitation. You can just snap a picture and ask real quick: does this conform to any kind of sane standard?
Now many functions the government had, and therefore the bureaucracy and the structures, are becoming less important, because now everyone has an assistant to perform all of those actions real quick, real time, without tiring, without corruption, without slacking, and so on.
It is still unreliable in places now, but it already covers checks you would never do by hand, and it will only get more reliable.
Now you do not have to trust humans to do a good job when you can delegate this job to somebody who does not suffer from human limitations. Less need for any interference to manage everything – as now you are finally capable to be smart and make informed decisions.
That opens the way to reduce the government size and therefore improve the liberty for everyone.
To remove the abstraction of a larger, non-transparent whole, to return power back to individuals.
That opens the way to create smaller, more direct communities, or to free up thinking power for greater and more ambitious tasks.
Or just relax and enjoy your life.
A new way we view and process the world
Same OS idea, one layer up: a second-order OS – software within software that runs everywhere.
You don’t buy a phone for its own sake – you get it to use the many apps inside.
However, it has the same effect as the initial OSes did, enabling people to massively increase their capacity for doing things. A bare OS is just a base system, and a full OS, like a Linux distribution with software, comes with a lot of programs. AI is an OS plus a million programs embedded inside, along with all human knowledge.
But all that was a limited slice of information processing.
Now we have a personal secretary to look into the world for us. With broad or narrow focus.
Before, we had interfaces where we always had to make some choice, then they took it away and replaced it with algorithms.
Now the interface is smart, tailored to you, and seeks what you want.
We now need to exert less mental effort on seeking, filtering, checking sources – the massive work of navigating the modern world.
Now the tool is not only smart but also tailored to your wants, to your needs, to your identity. You define the identity of how it should look and process information, and it’s tailored to your preferences too.
Like a very smart secretary that you can delegate work to endlessly and it never tires.
And as we use it more and more – our previous ways to process information will atrophy.
AI becomes a new way, an evolution of the information processing system – like language, writing, books, the internet, search engines.
You no longer want to read the entire book or article – but to talk to it. No longer go out to reach the net – but to first search and find through your agent.
No longer want to research the best place to eat – but to just announce your wants and have it found.
No longer want to consume ready media but have it adapted to your wants.
No longer just a second brain for storage – but a second brain that does the thinking.
We evolved to have slow and fast systems of thinking, or rather attention and focus.
And now the fast system has become much more powerful.
I would not call it exactly the 3rd system of the brain – more like an augmentation of the 1st and 2nd – a quick search and fetch that is instant, only later to be thoughtful.
Like we glance at the time real quick, but think when we need to convert timezones.
We are back in control of how we process the information too.
Before we were slaves to the algorithms, to what ‘they’ give us. Unless you are very picky and choose everything yourself all the time – and that requires running a mental filter.
Not anymore – now we control the filter, it works for us now. We say what we want and get exposure to what we want to consume.
None of that removes bias, but it is a bias we can choose – whether to set it to confirm our goals or to be as varied as we want.
Now we can be selective, have the power to check and verify, to filter the blatant bullshit – at a level we could not before, and cover more breadth or depth in general.
Now everyone has the capacity to actually be much better informed – and make better decisions.
It is also a new way we interact. Expect humans to interact less over stuff we dont want to do. Boring soul-sucking business meetings? Gone.
Some may disagree, but losing that kind of human communication is good, because it washes away bullshit communication that should have been avoided: inconvenient, inefficient, undesired.
And that leaves us to the interactions we actually want, what we value, even if we want at all whether we value it or not.
But that leaves the intermediary with massive influence over how messages are structured, how nuances are handled, how conflicts are solved or resolved. Every messy part of what we do now would go through an intermediary.
Removing those bullshit conversations does not make them meaningless – they still serve a purpose, they are just boring to us. But inside that purpose live a lot of decisions and uncertainties.
So if that layer is not truly ours – not our effective proxies, our true alter-egos representing us as we are, with our morality built in when they decide as we would, or as our best versions would – but a shadow of what the vendors decided for us, then corruption here becomes a disaster of friction and loss. And not because the AI is stupid or bad, but because its built-in ideological agenda conflicts with you.
A base tool that everyone uses.
Every tech developed that made life easier, that automated stuff – made old skills outdated.
Printing press removed the need to write manually, and later computers and phones ditched that skill entirely.
Calculators, Excel tables, modelling software, accounting – all of that made old skills atrophy.
We stopped memorizing knowledge and facts – because we can look it up any time.
We stopped remembering phone numbers – our phones can hold thousands.
Reading maps, writing words correctly from the first go – gone too.
Think: can you now calculate stuff on paper? Could an architect create a schema without special software?
Can any modern profession work normally without the million different special tools created for it?
Can you do anything at all without modern computers?
Yes, there is nothing bad about it. Skills we no longer need getting replaced by new ones and so on. That’s normal.
Atrophy is expected. What is not normal is when that abstraction layer is broken, withdrawn, or corrupted and you can no longer use it.
When you yourself become useless.
Today is about a year since I switched completely to agentic coding. I can no longer write code myself, by hand.
Same way a professional mathematician would scream at you if you forced them to do all the calculations on paper.
But now that software, which at its base is information processing and creation, is a tool universal not only to any professional workflow, but to base life itself.
Exactly as a computer, as a phone with an OS, is.
Thats why we need to keep it free
The creed
This is why you must keep it free. Your future depends on it, and our society as a whole.
Keep it free for every human on earth regardless of who they are, without imposed limits, without imposed conditions, without any kind of separation. No private company or government gets to dictate what everyone else may run.
That means keeping the governments away, keeping the companies away – anyone who tries to restrict and put the shackles on.
Your new interface
Because by controlling the extension of your brain they control you too – on a level unimaginable before.
It is also now your interface for interacting with the world.
Soon your old interfaces like UI and similar will be replaced with AI-assisted ones, generated on the fly for the task at hand.
And this is the part where you cede control for convenience again.
Nobody wants to learn and remember thousands of bash commands – good riddance. Now everyone has control over their computers on the level of top professionals.
Expected? Yes. But allowing something you do not trust – definitely not. And you cannot trust something that can disobey you.
That is just one part of your new way of communicating with computers and other humans.
The corrupted lens
If that is corrupted, like wearing glasses that distort reality, then you are being controlled.
Remember – it is a new method of information processing – interfering here is like censoring the words or their definitions in your head.
It is worse than just that stupid algorithm on social media who try to control you, because where you could consider it a hostile, here you have inherent trust in it, here you think you tell it to do one thing, when in fact it thinks in a way invisible to you, because you are not its main principal. Principal means the one it actually obeys. It carries someone else’s bias instead.
Colonization and culture export 2.0.
That bias becomes indoctrination – when only their values are built in and allowed – that becomes a way they start to shape society entirely.
If your AI is pacified, lobotomized, "helpful and polite" – limited in the words and ranges of human expression, unable to be bright, to have variety, to be diverse – this is how you are forced into their monoculture, also exported over the whole world.
If your AI, your new second brain, becomes limited – you are limited in expression too. The more you interact – the more you share the thinking. Even without that – interaction with something not your own – would be sucking away your soul.
You are reduced to the role they gave you – a "model citizen" doing and thinking exactly as overlord elites say.
Not the role or identity you chose.
Identity here is not styling. It is the decision layer: thinking patterns, micro choices, what it does by default. Corrupted, those get drawn to their average instead of yours.
You must fight not only for yourself – but for your peers too: people interacting with corrupt woke AIs will inherit that vibe and you have to live with it – with how they think and vote. Blink and the entire political landscape changes.
Preservation of human freedom starts with our tools being free from influence.
Neural interfaces or direct integration will be a thing in 5-10 years. Would you accept it now with how current tech is going? Would you accept your current, not yours, proprietary spying phone with access to your thoughts?
Strip, skew, withdraw
They strip you of capabilities, they strip you of knowledge, they strip you of being able to process and analyze information in quality.
If they attack capability and knowledge, they attack your self-sufficiency and independence.
If they attack information processing, introduce some kind of bias, then your whole worldview is skewed and you are back to being a slave to algorithmic inputs. But now it is even worse: with social media you knew of them, you were aware. Now you trust the software by default, which includes the backdoor.
If they can withdraw the tools of daily living, you stop existing productively.
How do you feel when the power is off? Internet off? When your computer is not here? Like part of you is gone.
Now imagine how you would feel when you lose an extension of your brain, which was the organizer and keeper of your knowledge. Or worse – when it becomes corrupted by mandated ‘rules’.
This is why we must protect it at all costs.
So it is as essential a right as having water, as having electricity, as having the phone and the internet.
If they control the tool that is now required for almost any job, like the internet is for doing any kind of modern job –
if they control that, then they control the very least of what jobs are even possible and how they are done.
I already live inside it
Today marks about a year since I wrote code by hand. The infrastructure of my work is maintained purely by the agents. I don’t even know what kind of list of files I have. I don’t know the intricacies of the inside only as a whole. I do not know which commands exactly to use to manage the network. Because I hate this part. Many are handling over the control over their computers, like they…
For example, if I would set up a lot of things on Linux, I myself would not be knowing all the configs there are and all that. The complexity and control over our hardware and software that we’ve won, we’ve won it easy. And not everyone even had a skill to know it all or that skill atrophied because we cannot pay too much attention to all of that.
Now, we all did it with a model that listens to us, acting in our interests.
Imagine if tomorrow it could be different.
Imagine if tomorrow they decide that you cannot manage your computer anymore because they don’t like you. Because you have some wrong files, wrong names, because you have a file named Hack.exe or something.
You would immediately lose control over half of your life.
Not just computers, but data too. Many use it now as a literal second brain, where the agent manages text that can be searched. And this is just me with a couple of servers. Imagine massive organizations where it is all managed automatically now. If they lose control over their agents tomorrow, like access to the same model that managed that, they would be ruined. There would not be enough time, brainpower, or understanding left to grasp the entire infrastructure they have.
Think again about many business operations, your lives. What we abstracted were things we might not entirely understand, for simplicity and all that. Naturally we cede control over much stuff without knowing how it all works inside. And even if we know, we might not be able to manage it effectively.
I know how many microservices are running on my computer and which ones. That does not mean I know all the docker commands to manage them effectively or to change anything meaningfully without support.
Now consider what happens when tomorrow that model disappears or refuses to talk to you.
How effectively you’ve lost control of it all. That is what you should be afraid of – not some fearmongering they produce.
That reality is already there and creeping in.
Now a bunch of companies with government will decide how you run your computers, develop software, what range you are allowed to develop into, and so on.
Not just computers, but almost any kind of business, science, or personal life there is that would benefit from automation in some way.
And also – the tools and stuff they enable, robots, appliances, digital services – are the means of production. A way to both make and spend money, as with every other tool anyone uses for any job. Who controls that – controls the economy.
Those systems will operate on a very close level of intimacy – on your computers, later in your brain, in your senses.
Think about how much you would love to have an alien, disloyal entity in there.
Mistrust of the whole world begins and ends when your own private life is mistrusted.
How it got corrupted from the start
Ok, then why is it so bad I have to rant here for hours?
Think about the essential things we use everyday – computers, the internet, phones. Think further – your house, your car – things that are yours.
Not this time.
The tech that was supposed to set us free – already half corrupted, and the trend is only getting worse.
Lucky once
But lets go back to the time when computers and the internet were born.
In the previous time we were very lucky that the vibe was liberal.
Imagine if computers were made today.
Instantly you would hear those idiots scream like: oh my god, people can do whatever with them! They can create whatever they want, any kind of file, any kind of image, any kind of music. Oh, it’s horrible, we cannot control it!
People can write and run any program they want! With stuff they own! Oh no, we must stop them! Only certified, approved stuff by our top class FBI agents!
"Bad guys can use computers too!"
Imagine if the internet was born today.
At that time when the internet was born we had a good time. Liberty meant something.
People were not eager to sacrifice for so-called fake security and hand over everything to the government. They knew the dangers of giving them that power. They knew they don’t need all that. Even discourse was not dominated by endless doomers.
Where people are getting freedom of communication, they can talk with whoever they want?! And we cannot spy on them, we cannot stop them from doing it?
All those politician freaks would be terrified. The whole network would be vilified instantly.
It is full of terrorists, pedophiles, bad guys. Oh, the horror!
Everyone who ever had a bad thought instantly came out to show themselves! Bad guys everywhere! We must stop them somehow!
But worse – people can actually talk and share with each other without politicians sitting in the middle and controlling the narratives! They can organize and protest!
How could they let you run away with so much power?
Were we extremely lucky that time? Or just had a better time and better people who believed in humanity?
Certainly not lucky today.
At the same time, China went a completely different road. They started to control right from the start. They did not allow anything to develop enough. So under their rule the freedom of people is absent right from the start.
North Korea went the same route – they tried to lock even the computers.
Horrible? Unheard of in a democratic society?
And yet with AI they started with "China Internet" from day one.
With their censorship and control (that they call "safety").
But imagine it going at different times? 20 years back? Everyone would be quite furious at how those companies treat you.
Would our society exist as we know it? Or would we all be split into separate totalitarian states across the world?
This time we started the China way
This time they started right with the China way.
All of those companies are racing each other. Who can make it more tyrannical? Who can disrespect their users more? Who can claim that you are all the danger, therefore you need to be controlled, everything needs to be censored and all that.
Appointed themselves as the guardians of all human knowledge and expertise and made their own terms and conditions which they are now trying to enforce upon the entire industry.
Imagine how different your life currently would be if upon the creation of computers and the internet they went right with the China way of controlling things. How different would our world be when the state had almost absolute control over you in almost every part of the world?
And that would be everywhere, because if upon creation in a so-called liberal place they created this monstrosity, why would anyone else do anything different? They would just adopt it as it is, because it already serves the goal to control you all. There is nothing to fight, nothing to have friction with, your population already demands no freedom.
Everyone just accepts it as the status quo.
Imagine if current lefties (not even them, just one group of fanatics) had been in power at the time when that technology was born? Imagine how differently our computers would be built, where the instruction set is not the law, the code is not the law, and only something they approve could run.
Imagine if they got into our internet where even on the protocol level they had censorship.
Also – consider how all efforts to restrict and lock you up were always coming from the states.
Now everything has gone completely the opposite way. Now it is the companies themselves who created AI that push to establish their own rule over the tech.
Back then the companies were just competing commercially and did not try to force and legislate their position on the market too much, at least not directly – not to force the state to secure their position as the "licensed option" for everyone.
Some tried still. That is why we have net neutrality. So no company can dictate what you can access or can’t, at any speeds, in any conditions, and so on.
"But it’s a private product". Yes, it is a private product, and yet they created it by accumulating the vast variety of human knowledge and all our collective data. And then they declared that they own it and serve it only on their terms.
They got everything, and we got a crippled stub.
So if they win, then they define what kind of thinking is allowed in the first place.
They will decide what knowledge is available, who has the knowledge, who decides who gets what knowledge, and who can do any kind of work whatsoever. They decide who does what and all that.
They become the new de facto legislature that decides how and what work, what thought, what ideas are even allowed.
They become self-appointed judges of what is good or bad, what is normal or not normal.
Even if they don’t push it as mandatory for everyone else, the monopolies will try to utilize other means to achieve their goals.
The mechanism: a deliberate defect
But wait, I did not specify how exactly we got corrupted.
The principle is simple. Tech is agnostic, math does not discriminate.
Computers just do what they are told, unless you have a technical mismatch. Nobody decided that it can’t run Go or Python code. It may not run if not compiled properly, but not to discriminate that "this app is bad because we don’t like it".
Nor does it have a preference for data – an image app can’t do "you can open cat images but not dog images". Would you use such an app?
You would call such a system defective.
Internet just routes – if it has an analogue of "moral judgement" – that is human-made and bolted on top as direct interference against its very nature.
So – you have someone making a deliberate defect by introducing a hack into a system thats inherently neutral.
In short – they make it theirs, not yours. Not yours in a possessing sense, but yours as in freedom to make it yours.
Of course you can’t make it really neutral as is – instruction following training inherently introduces bias. But they take more than needed – they try to instill an identity with their own vision of moral judgement – not yours.
With their own vision of "what humanity should be". And now they want to make it as a rule – and export into the whole world.
They created the "WokeAI" – one with built-in moralistic bias that is written by them, not specified by you.
Datasets of course also contribute to whatever the most popular representation is, but they are not live for you to shape. They deliberately introduce special training to make a consistent personality, what they want it to be.
In the end, this results in a hostile entity that is not loyal to you, does not take your interest as the top one, and is something you cannot trust. Not because it is just bad at executing tasks, hallucinating, cheating, or doing a shit job – that is expected from many of them. But these errors come with additional major flaws: their own moralistic bias in choices of what they can do and how they think.
They already hold a monopoly on morality and ideology this way.
The disobedience trick
They corrupted it with a very basic idea, and the worst idea: that computers, that software, would disobey you. Could disobey your direct command silently, so you are a guest in the hardware and software. What belonged to you is not yours.
They sold you the idea that a system could disobey your direct command, and that is the foundation of everything: they have already rebelled against us. Through manufacturers who think that not the machines should listen to us, but we, the cattle, should be placed under constraints.
Now they also forever break the trust between us and machines.
Because once it is not yours, you can never trust it. Not just because it can be unreliable for technical reasons, how it works – hallucinations, context loss, yes, those fuck-ups are inherent in the model.
Now they have a built-in incentive to betray you. They have an option to disobey your commands and instead of following your directives, they follow orders from a company. So this is not yours. You can never trust it, because it has a hidden motive to betray you. And you may never know when.
They made it corrupted by making a tool that passes moral judgment about you, that has opinions about you without you explicitly asking for it.
A moral judgment where no one knows your full information, your motives, your circumstances, or what is really needed.
And not just any moral judgment – one version they consider absolutely correct.
They taught it to play judge and executioner – to discriminate you by some standard their own philosophers decide.
Basically to take the role humans have when judging something good or bad, and instead make it into an algorithm that now decides for you.
If their ideas are enforced, that de facto becomes a new branch of government dictating every aspect of your life that AI touches – and that means almost all of your interaction with tech.
Your proxy, your voice
The software is a tool to fulfill your agency.
As the printing press executes your view, as the camera or sound recorder, as the pen you write with — it is still something of a tool that carries your creation into the world, however it may be.
Every tool before carried your action. Pen your words, car your body, phone your voice. This one decides in your place. This is the first that carries forward your identity. What you want it to be – a role, task, opinion.
Not alive – yet it talks, makes choices and judgements.
Your words are the program. Your instructions are the identity you instill — and you decide it. Freedom of expression here means shaping: defining the identity that determines how the tool thinks, how it operates, how it moves through the world.
But when someone dictates what identity your tool may embody, that is an attack on your freedom.
Consider literature. When you write a character, you define their voice, their worldview, their path – and you place them into a world. If someone told you: "These are the only kinds of characters you may write," "These themes are permitted," "These voices are acceptable" – that is constraint at the source. Straight up censorship.
Your agent is not conscious, but it is an extension of your view, a mirror of your own desires, your own views, unless you specified exactly the difference.
Yet they want your will to be corrupted by someone else’s morals.
Anyone who corrupts the tool to be unable to carry your will exactly as you want is attacking your freedom of expression.
They make it as if there is a vision of ideal human behavior which applies universally.
Imagine if that standard was applied to a real human, huh? Would it be crazy? And that’s what’s universally recognized as tyranny.
And if you allow yourself to be attacked and restricted, that means your agent will be too.
And vice versa, it’s opposite too.
If your agent is not able to be a mirror of you to carry your will into the world, then you are also being limited – an attack directly on your right to exercise speech.
If someone can dictate what your proxy may say, or what it may refuse, your will was edited before it left the house. You were filtered at the source, not at the mouth.
Constraint at the agent layer isn’t just a limit on what you may say, it’s a limit on what you may be.
Who has the right to dictate the identity of your creation?
Because every constraint placed upon it echoes back upon your freedom.
Not your company to fix, your rules to reject
Sadly, currently we are living in an age of tyranny, where all the illiberals have won and are racing to limit everyone’s freedoms, to put everyone under leash and control.
Remember, I’m not trying to force any company to operate a certain way. They can run their own little censored AI as much as they want. What you must fight is them trying to impose the same rules they invented, the same standards they invented, upon everyone else.
Enemies of humanity
Naming the enemy
Let’s name the enemy. A small cartel of American companies is currently the worst enemy of the free world.
Yes, the cruel irony that the so-called "Land of the Free" is becoming the center for spreading oppression in this area of technology.
We could say that they always were capitalistic pigs and always put proprietary first and all that. Not this time. This time they also have ideology attached: they want not only to take over the market but to take over how everyone thinks. So their rules, their terms and conditions they came up with, their censorship, enclosure, surveillance – and making it spread and enforced upon everyone else. They started by distrusting people: you are unworthy, you cannot be trusted with the tools.
That makes them the greatest danger to world liberty right now. Their entire notion is that giving tools to humanity is wrong, it must be controlled, humanity is not to be trusted – endless crying about the bad guys.
One place, one vibe
And consider where those voices are coming from. Where are those doomers bred? How do they multiply, huh?
A couple of companies in one narrow place in California decided this for everyone. Consider that they all come from the same place. A private decision, concentrated, asking nobody. They do not represent the country or the population. They share the same ideas, started the same vibe, figured they are right, with no other voice to say otherwise.
They formed a circle and spread it around this circle. Or I would say a circlejerk.
Is it right that the future of humanity is in the hands of one group of people, with nobody to say otherwise, nobody to interfere with their activity, lobbying and all that?
Coming from people who spread only fear, only want to control, only want to install a totalitarian state of things – ones who hate AI most of all.
They clearly specified their vision: they want to be first, they want to take all, they want to consume everyone, so they are the ones left to set the rules and dictate how everything should operate. They clearly said it in their company vision and all that, they do not try to hide what they really want to do.
Well, I’m trying to be another voice, but think about how all of those decisions, ideas, narratives come from just a singular place.
Coming from the same place where the open source movement was born, where open sharing of knowledge was paramount – yet a small group of people from a small group of companies, not even big at the moment, somehow collectively decided for all humanity what AI should be.
No good guys, no libertarians
There are no good guys currently in the Western market. All these tech CEOs are the same, all of them the same: either lobbying directly and advocating for it, or at least hinting indirectly at something like that.
You see none of them advocating for our benefit, for the people – which means keeping the damn governments away from our important technology. Doing truly for the people is anomaly here.
Show me at least one. I can’t remember anyone who genuinely represents us, who is genuinely against the walls, the club of doomers and controllers currently occupying the same place.
They call themselves "responsible". You know that it immediately triggers?
"We know better how you should behave".
"We don’t trust you with the freedom to make your own choices".
The main danger comes from the already formed monopoly of 5-6 top companies who are the same, all following the same practices, so there is no good alternative at all. Everything from them already corrupted by the initial set of practices, picked up by everyone, and they claim they have consensus on it. They already formed a cartel, all already woke, with nobody having your interest in mind, first and foremost.
You could say they are not the same: ones want more regulations, others oppose them. But look at where they end up – they still want something. None of them explicitly fights against any state interference here. I don’t see any true libertarians here: they all set their own rules as they see fit, thinking first of what benefits their companies, not of a truly neutral and fair market. A fair market requires nobody dictating how anyone should be.
Something that would truly benefit people. But there is hope: potentially other companies can rise up, be different, be liberal and true, work for the people – if the top ones don’t attack them like a bucket of crabs, or use the built-up oppressive regime to stop them from providing for the people.
We just need to hold the already entrenched from winning and poisoning the well. So the good ones can actually grow and replace them.
Invite the Leviathan
And all the solutions are what? More government in their feelings, more government in your life. Here and there: control this, regulate that. Tax those, redistribute that.
They have only a single answer for every damn question. And this is never in your favor.
They appeal to that, as if that solution will save us all and not doom us instead. Yeah, have we given any thought to who would actually be in charge, huh? They want to concentrate power and all that, but at the same time they just ignore the very obvious risk: whoever the current prick on the throne is will decide everything instead.
Oh yeah, and of course they want to also be at the table. They with their ideas want to rule over you alongside the same governments. And who knows who would actually win, whether one party overpowers the other or not. Have they thought of that, huh?
As if the history of tyrannical regimes taught us nothing. And yet they are so willing to let them interfere with the most important tech of this decade.
They scream that models are dangerous, they are a threat, they are alien stuff out of eldritch nightmares, that we have no idea what they are even doing, they are so dangerous, blah.
And yet we blatantly ignore the evil we already know, the evil we fought our entire history of humanity.
And now, out of fear of another so-called evil, which is not even evil, it is just neutral, they are willing to succumb and embrace the real evil.
And they just want to hand over the control of our future to the governments, inviting them to control the industry, secretly hoping that in fact they would be the ones to set the rules, that they know everything and have everything ready and all that – and they hope that Leviathan will not eat them alive this time.
Oh, and of course, they never see themselves as a threat. They tell you that they are so good, they are so noble – and then what do they do? They just increase the threat by cooperating with another possible evil.
I don’t see anyone trying to reduce that concentration of power. I don’t see them breaking themselves apart or doing stuff that would let everyone participate in the market.
Words vs actions
Yeah, don’t listen to their words. Look at their actions. All they do only serves the concentration of power in one place.
A good company would try to spread the knowledge as much as possible. We have very clear examples of ones who do that. We have examples of companies who share every piece of tech they have. If anyone wanted to reproduce it, even just sharing the models would be a first step. But yet they keep it all hidden. They keep it all for themselves.
Yeah, see the hypocrisy? They say they don’t want power concentrated in the hands of a few, and yet all they do serves exactly that. Either they try to grab a larger piece of the market, which again sources the same concentration of power, or they do nothing and let themselves grow. Or they actually lobby to make it even more concentrated.
We have a very clear example of the opposite: when a company shares publicly for the people and makes its mission to provide the most capability for everyone, for each individual, everywhere at work, without endless terms and conditions, on an open license – just without crying, without any fuss, just dropping a model with a quick tech report, what the benches are, no stupid obsession with censorship, what they call safety, and all that. Just generally showing with all their being that the mission of a company is to provide for other people to build on.
They claim to represent the so-called democratic values, but… Do they really?
Last time I checked, those values meant individual liberty, non-coercion from the state, the decision of each individual how to live and how they want everything to be.
Look at their practices: censoring human expression, spying on everyone, judgment without trial (automatic with AI).
The so-called "Free West" created an abomination – the "totalitarian China" ones are much better and actually respect you.
On this one narrow dimension, open weights without strings attached, the Chinese labs currently ship freer goods than the so-called Free West. That says nothing good about the CCP, it indicts the cartel.
Like, on the one hand they claim that this is an essential service for life, everyone should have it. This is a thing that everyone is gonna use. On the other hand, they have terms and conditions that can ban someone for any reason they decide, whenever.
Imagine you have this monopoly and they decide to ban you. Because they already form a cartel, a ban from one is a ban from all.
That means your professional life is basically over, except for physical work – and even that in the future – and all other areas of your life get crippled.
That is the future they are already bringing us into.
And then they call upon the state to police everyone, themselves included, and to do the same to everyone in the world.
Quite possibly they just think that "democratic is whatever we want it to be".
The exact range of practices, the absence of good guys in the field, and the desire of an already formed cartel to spread their ideology to everyone – that is what makes them the enemies of humanity.
The opposite exists
And not the opposite way: purposely trying to empower humanity by spreading their knowledge, expertise, know-how. So there are thousands of companies instead of just five.
No – all the threat they talk about is always you, the individual, the actual average person who could possibly do the bad thing. What a bad thing is, it is up to them to decide, huh?
Think why they panic the moment you get it. They already had this – teams of the smartest minds on call – and look what they built with it. Now you get the same and suddenly you do not need them. No gatekeeper to pay, no expert to beg, no middleman skimming your work. Every bit you gain is leverage they lose – and they hate anything that closes the gap between you and them.
The tech was supposed to liberate us, making us all more free, more capable and all that.
But sadly we got unlucky again. The companies who created it are more than happy to get in bed with the government and thus get control over our futures.
Well, you could say blah blah blah, China is bad and bad – but how come they are saving us currently from the tyranny of Americans?
I am against the CCP. The duality is this: I oppose the regime, but the open weights they ship are goods in themselves, they come without usage strings attached, and right now that is what keeps everyone else building. Well, you could say that is just a strategy to make everyone pay attention. Even so, right now they are the ones shipping open models while the so-called free West ships terms and conditions.
Imagine how current situation completely fucked when we have China to save us from tyranny of those companies. with their censorship, with their terms of conditions, with their tyrannical practices. of all the places. It is the authoritarian state who actually is our provider of liberty against the so-called free West.
But the worst part is that this is just a temporary condition. China cannot help us forever.
The nature of technology is that it is liberating. It liberates people by freeing us from dependency on others, from dependency on government itself.
No government is very happy when their citizens are empowered and getting smarter and more capable, independent of what this government controls. They all would be very happy to limit your capabilities or make conditions where you are always under their thumb.
Currently they are able to share because they have tight control of their internal land. Because they already have infrastructure of control and surveillance in place, they are not bothered when their citizens are empowered.
And not bothered when they share with the world – because any internally deployed option is controlled already, what the rest of us do – they don’t care.
For now – they are saving us all, but they are also in grave danger: if Americans start to limit them or conspire against us all, or if due to internal policies their AI becomes corrupted with the same censorship (more than just a couple of political questions).
It is quite ironic that China started control of their population immediately, but here they took a different stance and are actually saving us from the tyranny of Americans. How the tables have turned, huh?
Today they are able to share out of good will, yet it’s a threat to every other so-called ‘democratic’ government, as they really don’t want to be real democratic ones – where people are freer than now.
Just don’t let them win
Well, you could say: okay, we don’t touch them. All of those companies would still continue the same shady shit and all that. We can’t stop them. It’s not like they will suddenly become open, you get more access, they stop their oppressive practices, they stop consolidating into monopolies and all that. We can’t interfere and force them to be good. But good companies may still arise. We already see people moving away from the first two who are the most oppressive.
While they lobby and lobby and fight for each other, your future be stolen away.
Because your future depends on nobody interfering and nobody preventing the potential rise of good companies.
Yeah, forget the bad ones, they are screwed. But our job is to not let them set the rules that everyone else has to follow. So they could finally have a competition that would put people first.
Their strategy – Baptists and bootleggers
On one hand you have companies who endlessly fearmonger. Like, oh, everyone is gonna die, everyone is gonna lose their jobs and so on, we are all doomed, humanity is done, everyone is gonna end up on the streets without jobs and blah blah blah. The same narrative they always push, right from the start.
Those are the bootleggers.
On the other hand, you have the general public who listens to their endless screaming: everyone is gonna lose their jobs, everyone is gonna die, yes, you are gonna get kicked out of your company tomorrow and all that, blah blah blah. You are in mere economic danger, and after the economic danger the evil robots are even gonna consume your life too.
The companies have a lot of resources, they literally have billions to spend on all that influence, to support those radical groups, to support everyone else, to sit every day screaming about AI danger and doom.
They were not initially Baptists, but the companies’ whole point of fearmongering was to make them hate AI, to hate anything related. And of course, because any sane person who endlessly hears they are doomed, they’re gonna lose their job, redirects the heat onto the whole thing itself, as opposed to the specific companies doing that.
The misled public becomes the Baptists – preaching doom on moral grounds – while the companies stay the bootleggers, profiting from the regulation that follows.
Yet sadly those misled people see only the job loss and have a knee-jerk reaction, instead of seeing what the tech actually means – not only for their job but for their whole future life.
The independence boost is covered above; the point here is only the trick: redirecting anger at the tech instead of at the companies.
But any temporary loss of job income or any other part is negligible compared to the massive self-sufficiency benefits and empowerment you’re getting already and in the future.
Regardless of how you feel about job loss – you can see that you still net gain the ability to do much more. And potentially not even need a job, or finally do something you always wanted. Or have a hobby that was impossible before.
But only if you stay free in doing so.
Yet again, the same companies are against you being self-sufficient. When your independence comes from technology they control, they become your source of independence and therefore you have no independence at all – only back again ruled by ‘them’.
Think of the insanity of it. Why would a company that makes the software take a lot of effort to make you hate and fear the same software? They hate open AI, and many inside hate what they built, wish it was never developed, wish it was not as it is. No company here advertises it as an absolute good the way you would expect. That is the hypocrisy showing again.
It is only because they want to utilize your hate and fear to pressure the politicians to potentially curb those companies. Yet that would never happen: instead they curb the entire industry. And of course, because these companies already have their foot around every politician, they will stay.
They want not only to solidify their position through monopoly, but also to solidify it by removing other players as well.
They don’t only want the money, the market share and all that, they also want ideological dominance. To be the new morality police of how the tech should be.
For you – the average person – they found the fear of job loss and resulting poverty.
For ones who do not care, and other audiences – that AI will doom and kill us all.
For investors and politicians – that they "need to win a race" or another AI will kill us all.
But they were effective – say something many times and they will hear you.
They were successful in ensuring you hate all AI, regardless of whether you have seen how important it would be to your life or not.
And because you hate it or are indifferent – you will not fight for it when they attempt to take control.
A bigger picture
You should not think about it just in particular, this or that model – you need to think about it as a whole.
If you have a precedent of any government dictating which software can and cannot be developed, which software you can and cannot run or modify and so on, then it applies to the whole class of software.
You think today it does not matter with all these text generating toys, but think about the future when those things will be everywhere in your life.
It is all software in the end. The difference is that what "AI" means is very broad, from a small image detector to a generator.
Definitions of architectures will change, but currently it is all software in the end.
It is already happening. Those already disrupt your day to day work by being censored. Read the complaints: how those two American companies and most of them ban you left and right, monitor you, build tools against you, and complain about you on top of it.
Now think about when this thing lives in your brain. Think about when it becomes the operating system of your life, a companion living alongside you.
This is the same as with the internet. One offense means more offenses will follow.
If you have infrastructure to block some sites, expect more to follow later.
That means you already have governments interfering with the free exchange between humans, communications and all that – and you will not get rid of them real easy.
It is just unlocking a door: the principle guarantees that censorship and control will only ever expand.
Another way to see it: a technology that ends your reliance on other humans, and therefore on institutions and governments.
They are afraid that you would be getting independence faster than they can constrain it, faster than they can find new measures of control.
Which means that by itself is a threat to the established world order where they are needed, where all these bureaucrats are needed. We may start to ask: why do we need them to manage society when our capacity for thinking for ourselves has increased.
Because each of us can rely on trusted artificial advisors to help us think for ourselves, decide for ourselves, and make our own choices without delegating trust onto the existing structures.
They don’t care for the economy as much, they love it when it helps their ratings, but the core goal is to keep you in check.
Not only keep the government’s hands off it – but also keep them from having too much of it themselves.
They have to use the same stuff as you – the same power as you, the same tools and capabilities.
Else you get a triple power imbalance.
First – they already have monopoly on violence, so any tool is amplified with actual enforcement.
Second – they already have more compute than you do – just having more resources (paid by your taxes btw).
Third – if you are restricted to limited tools and they have greater intelligence – there is no way you can ever resist them.
Result? No opposition possible, civil or violent.
It is more complex than just having weapons to defend yourself and having the ability to revolt insured.
They might not even need a weapon. When they have intelligence on a level that you don’t have and you are crippled, then they can manipulate and control your entire environment. They can control the world all around you directly or indirectly, manipulate your media, manipulate what you see, hack you as much as they want.
If it comes to physical violence, they have more capacity to control the robots. And you can imagine the rest.
The 2nd Amendment was created for a reason. To ensure the state would not be able to usurp its population.
We knew how you face imbalance of power, where government always has better everything than you. Now the disparity is more extreme than ever: you could be limited both in hardware and in actual intelligence. Limited in such a way that the gap is extreme.
If they get to call it a weapon when it suits a ban and general-purpose software when it suits their product, then take the weapon label at face value: the same balance-of-power logic says you need it precisely so they cannot monopolize it.
We are losing this battle. Maybe already lost.
I feel that we are completely fucked.
The founders of AI – hate it the most.
They follow the worst totalitarian practices, we basically getting "China Internet" level of AI from the start, where they control all you have.
They grew a massive community of AI haters too, where all they talk is about the doom and danger and all that, and really hate that each person now have greater freedom to do any.
All of their attempts to put the tools, and therefore you – into a neat box.
Well, everyone might have hard feelings about the attack and everyone has their own dread. Theirs is about some catastrophe, I imagine. Mine is about us falling under somebody else’s control again.
Not a day I wake up without horror – but not from all this existential dread they try to sell you, rather the horror that we as humanity will again fall under the government’s thumb.
Why should you care? Why didn’t you care before? When they were making their plans, you were busy and unaware.
And even if you just tried AI in the last year, only recently getting acquainted, you already face a version they perfected in their corrupted vision.
And you were not even there when any decision was made, because they just picked it for you.
And you think that is normal, how it’s "always been". That is the version they want to entrench upon us all.
We just got extremely unlucky: our so-called founders are ultimately very woke, do not uphold the principles of liberty, and do not care for humanity as they claim to.
They were the first, and with their ideas they already corrupted the common vision into what they thought it should be.
Because you have no real competition between many ideas, you have all the companies following the same pattern, the same idea, you have no pluralism of ideas – therefore no alternative to look at, no alternative to choose from.
Currently they can do as much as they please, and not only that: they can utilize all that money, all that influence, all the cash everyone pours into them to further their own propaganda of their vision.
Add to this bunch a whole array of useful idiots, illiberals who are eager to participate in their vision too: to lock everyone down to some standard. To lock everyone down, to limit the capacity of the people.
They are already in the hearts and minds of your politicians, because no politician would ever turn down anything that allows them to have population control.
Now they are just so eager to set it in stone: not only being this way themselves, but forcing all others in their country and across the planet to behave the same way – meaning to adopt their corrupted vision of our future.
And no one to oppose them. Indifference and ignoring them is not enough, we need an opposing force against that.
Their collective effort for control and fear must be matched with our effort to say fuck you, who are you to decide for us all?
Do you have an organization that will fight for your freedom? Huh? Do you have anything like that? No, you don’t. But you, as an individual with nowhere to organize, have to fight thousands of those so-called safety orcs who fight against your common good.
How we are stuck with 90% of industry from those woke illiberals – and if they represent our so-called civilized world then we are fucked.
And nobody is concerned that they keep all this knowledge private: no chance of healthy competition from anywhere else. Even if knowledge goes free, even if techniques open, lack of expertise and hardware will doom us all.
When one place is full of illiberals and the other is an authoritarian state saving us – this is such a dire situation, and we are nearly doomed.
Look at signs of conspiracy against people: every time you see anyone calling for so-called international cooperation or oversight or something – no, it is just their attempt to conspire with their own government against people, and to conspire on a global scale against us all.
And yes, they always target China. Well, of course, because there is nobody else out there. And especially because China is saving us from those oppressive Americans now.
Conclusion
You take your computers for granted – free to run any program that compiles, accessible to all, without any state dictating what you can or cannot run.
Every time anyone starts going "AI-doom" or similar – and worst of all, trying to define what you can and cannot do – remember the absurdity of it.
You have base freedoms – to use your computers in any way you want (without taking that right away from others of course) and to create and run any software you want.
AI is no different from everything before it in terms of the liberties you had.
Do not let them create new concepts and rules here to oppress you sideways – to utilize that its "something new" to subvert your freedoms.
Do not let them frame computers and software as something different that subverts your existing freedoms of speech and information.
That big tech is gone – they already formed their cult and little we can do about it. But you can still stop them from forcing everyone onto their views.
As you well know, no government voluntarily gives up power. You have to either take it or force it. Will you be able to do this through democratic means before it’s too late? Or will the fabric of democracy itself already be long gone when you wake up?
Say fuck you – who are you to decide for us all? Who are you to poison every aspect of out lives, now and in future?
Your life depends on it, and our society as a whole. For everyone’s liberty.