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24 min read

Authenticity's Triumph

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Authenticity's Triumph
Photo by Jean-Baptiste D. / Unsplash

Note: Other than for illustrative purposes, no LLMs were used in the creation of this content. All opinions, typos, em dashes, and uses of negative framing in this artisanal, hand-crafted content are my own.

There is a battle underway between those of us who produce value by beautifying, improving, and mending our frayed world, and those who seek to collect and hoard the fruits of our labor by fueling endless conflict as a means toward endless revenue. More recently, this battle has evolved through the proliferation of large language models (LLMs), which offer a simulacrum of human communication and creativity in the name of economic growth and efficiency.

The first step in solving a problem is defining it. While this story starts with the spirit of greed devouring our world, I believe it ends with a victory for humanity. Ironically, an increased scarcity of creativity and originality can be the driving force behind an increased intrinsic value placed on human, non-LLM ingenuity.

Part 1: Here Be Dragons

There is no more suitable metaphor for those addicted to wealth accumulation than the dragons of fantasy, creatures possessed by an insatiable need for more, equally feared and worshipped by fools through cartoonish acts of loyalty and exaltation, in earnings calls and cabinet meetings alike.

drag'on (dra-gən), noun 1. something or someone formidable or baneful 2. A real "drag on" society.
human (hyü-mən), noun 1. of, relating to, or characteristic of humans 2. One possessing humanity.

Psychologically mangled, they are drawn to seizing and holding power as a means to one end: the acquisition, preservation, and growth of their hoards. Incapable of acts of pure humanity and altruism, they're delighted to borrow against ours, while placating themselves and willing listeners with a myth: that they're divinely chosen creatures of benevolence, creating opportunity, jobs, and capital that would have never existed otherwise.

As healthcare and housing costs have ballooned against rising tides of inflation and climate change, dragons enjoy the high ground, perched upon hundreds of thousands of human lifetimes worth of riches, grown through the privatization of everything, including government. Our melting pot boiled slowly, but steadily: pensions replaced with 401(k)s in order to fund their enterprises, and unions, built on decades of sacrifice, smeared and eroded in favor of the tagline: "taking advantage of a divided workforce working directly with employees". While private equity funds have grown exponentially, wages have been virtually frozen through a series of "tough economic times" where the idea that "we're all in this together" is repeated ad nauseam. Our offensively convoluted healthcare and immigration systems have been transformed into systemic methods of indentured servitude.

Trillions of dollars have been poured into a gradual rebranding of public services as "socialism", and the extreme privatization that has followed have paved the way for draconic control of society's foundations.

They say to us:

"Your retirement, if it comes, will be financially stable only if you give us all of your productive years as tribute and risk your retirement capital by investing in companies we own and operate. If you dare even muse about forming alliances with other peasants, your employment prospects will suffer, or perhaps be eliminated entirely. You will not be paid more to sustain the cost of your existence, and if you defy us, you will be abandoned without sustainably affordable healthcare – you and your loved ones, children included, children especially, will endure the challenges of life, because we've privatized your safety net."

Cold-blooded, indeed.

We're On A Road To Nowhere

On October 20, 2024, almost two weeks before a national election, a crack PR team for a dragon of unprecedented masculinity we'll call the "McDragon" would conveniently descend upon a swing county in a swing state, to pose as a member of the proletariat in an act of political theater. A small, bewitched group of some of our very own cheered the McDragon on as if under a spell that had convinced them it was one of us. Some of them went so far as to participate in the charade, prescreened to obediently and cheerfully fetch their favorite delicacy, overdone red meat, from the swollen grip of the world's premier purveyor of it.

There, nestled safely within a cloister of stainless steel provided by an "independent" franchisee (who in turn, shielded his parent company within a cloister of plausible deniability) stood Earth's very own Asylum Demon. Presumably charmed by the discovery of a Diet Coke button that immediately produced its favorite caustic liquid (rather than waiting for a Navy petty officer to deliver it), from the depths of its aging gullet emerged an utterance that sounded vaguely human:

"I could do this all day."

As is customary for this particular dragon, its actions defied its words, and interacting with humans whilst standing upon two hind legs for an extended period of time proved untenable – it could only manage to sustain its spell for less than half the duration of an episode of early-2000s reality TV. Nevertheless, the event symbolized the perfect pairing of two corporate-backed entities, both lacking any redeemable qualities, both toxic to their most loyal customers, and both famous for conveniently forgetting to pay their debts.

I could not help but ask myself: What good do performative stunts like this among peasants serve dragons? Why venture so far from their lairs to engage in such trivialities?

Dragons seem willing to ignore and defy logic in order to validate and maintain their positions, of which they are ferociously territorial. In this instance, the McDragon could not stomach that its carefully manufactured credibility as a champion of the working class had been trumped, when an emergent challenger, who had the audacity to be born both female and a minority, authentically claimed she'd worked at the same establishment earlier in her life.

Ever dependent on acts of mockery, the McDragon sought to cheapen that lived experience, and ideally, to frame it as an outright lie in the susceptible minds of its most devout followers. For a political movement built entirely upon a spirit of spite, the lifted shoe fit snugly.

To be both a billionaire, and an outsider challenging the mainstream establishment, is logically impossible. While they aren't the establishment, their financial influence over it has effectively allowed them to guide it by proxy for decades. Giving a billionaire claiming to be an outsider control over the establishment simply merges the establishment and its funding (power and money) into a singularity.

Two weeks later, in spite of ominous warning signs and a failed prior act rife with isolation, death, and a insurrection, America again chose the dark path.

Come On Inside

On January 21, 2025, the McDragon ended Russia's invasion of Ukraine opened the gates of America's so-called "shining city on a hill" for what can best be described as a white collar crime spree (not to be confused with the first attempt four years prior).

Its cabinet, a circus comprised entirely of talentless freaks and B-listers, has repeatedly opted to shun the most important issues of our time, and instead deployed culture war chaff while supporting overt side quest nonsense (in order of trashiness):

The American federal government is behaving like a child who just inherited a trust fund and a nuclear cudgel. Unearned clout in hand, the McKinsey-fication of America (and the world) is at hand. Grifters, drunk on power, have swarmed the federal government in the McDragon's wake, selling delusions of grandeur and ego-preserving excuses and being paid handsomely for it, just as they’ve done in corporate boardrooms for decades.

The Tank

The lesser dragons initially hated the McDragon, until they realized it is effectively a battle tank, desperate to be respected, liked, or feared (in that order). For sale to the highest bidder or most flattering voice in the room, it is willing to flatten anyone in its path to get the validation it craves. Drawn to the smell of desperation, now they're hopelessly in love with it. With a past dirtier than any imagined smear, it can shamelessly ignore and absorb critique that other lesser dragons cannot. It does this while manipulating the working class and posing as their champion in order to win over their affection.

One of the McDragon's many gimmicks is to tout that it doesn't accept a salary. This is because it is willing to clear a legal path for the many lesser dragons following in its wake in exchange for payment, tribute, or both.

Every effort to oppose the McDragon only seems to strengthen it. Its ability to roll over any half-hearted or performative opposition converted the lesser dragons, and they're betting on humanity following their lead. While the McDragon is anything but infallible, the lesser dragons must maintain the illusion in order to validate their positions and continue their ransacking of our institutions. If weakness appears, the McDragon loses its utility. The charade collapses, the white collar crime spree ends. This is the reason for the seemingly blind support it enjoys from corporate executives and a completely captured media. Even the constant press coverage from its "opposition" contributes to its apotheosis.

Let's call the combination of the McDragon and its forces "dragonkind". Every audacious display of power exhibited by dragonkind serves as an intentional signal of impunity: Americans murdered, their perpetrators allowed to walk free, higher-ed institutions cut off from federal funding unless they bend the knee, and partial nationalization of corporations (like: Intel, U.S. Steel, MP Materials, IBM) – all of these acts serve to remind We the People, and the world, that "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything".

Stare decisis

Dragonkind has had a decades long obsession with capture of the judicial branch of the American government, and most importantly, the United States Supreme Court. A legal system based on the principle of legal precedent means codified rot with approval of the highest court in the land is inherently difficult to excise, as it rolls down to lower courts.

Every Apple News notification telling us the United States Supreme Court is allowing the McDragon or it's allies to do something inhuman is part of a larger process that exists to demoralize and dissuade us from standing together against a very surmountable cabal that compromised media outlets must portray as insurmountable.

Turncoats

One may think it impossible for there to be any aberration worse than a dragon, however there is one: Those willing to turn on humankind. For relatively small portions of the draconic hoard, class traitor podcasters and social media influencers have caved, willing to engage in bad faith debate and accept payment – even accolades – to serve as dragonkind's mouthpieces. We recently saw this as one of their most stalwart mouthpieces was celebrated in death via a multi-million dollar lionization campaign, where the spectacles of professional wrestling and televangelism appear to have merged, replete with pyrotechnics, live musical performances, and unhinged diatribes against any Americans who won't fall in line for the McDragon and its handlers. Under whitewashed eulogies, government-approved witch hunts were arranged, falsely equating critique of a culture war provocateur as approval of political violence, in an act of psychological projection that said more about the accusers than the accused.

Idolization of humankind's turncoats is a key part of their strategy: These are the forces that pandered to and captured the minds of a youth disaffected by decades of societal damage caused by the dragons themselves, but too young to have witnessed it firsthand. Without willing turncoats to operate their "new media" PR machine, dragons would have nothing to offer; nothing to share but bitterness.

Part 2: "AI"

At this point, most people would agree that the situation for non-dragons seems bleak, but at what appears to be the most precarious time possible, a new variable has appeared. The gray goo mused about by sci-fi authors is here, not in the form of matter-gobbling nanobots, but in both the form and function of LLM output (marketed as "AI") and its deleterious effect on our gray matter.

Any technology that has the same effect on our biological reward systems as slot machines should be met with thoughtful consideration and caution. LLMs feel exciting, but we would be foolish to not take lessons from the rise of two other transformative technologies – smartphones and social media – and the damage they've wrought upon our society.

Just as fast food tricks us into feeling sated despite a lack of nutritional value, LLMs trick us into feeling creative despite a lack of creativity, and in the long term, diminish our capability for true creativity. Like the dragons who own them, LLMs are engaged in a sort of thievery, disrespecting humanity by ruthlessly scouring our creations and cobbling together facsimiles of our output, while sapping our capability for creation.

Disclaimer: The use of the term "AI" is a deliberate rhetorical choice. Those in both government and corporate power wish to convey an illusion of responsibility for a technological achievement that has been foretold for so long that it has achieved mythological status in the minds of humanity. The truth is: LLMs are to AI as a mad-lib solving savant is to the full capacity of human thought. While undoubtedly powerful for some use cases, LLMs are a tool, not an intelligence by any measure of the word "intelligence". LLMs can provide accessibility gains to those who struggle with communication. They do a decent job translating languages, and they can help write repetitive, boilerplate code (I actually use them for this purpose). These are tools useful for automating the more mundane parts of software development, but they are not "intelligence". Adherence to strict, boring rules baked into the model is a good thing in the world of software frameworks. It's not good when writing creatively, or to inspire.

Let's be very clear: The dragons are not pitching "AI" because they believe it will lead to increased creativity or benefit humanity in the long term. They're pitching it because it is a gateway drug to a walled garden they fully own and operate, a system that supports a few other draconic motives:

Motive #1: To Write Is To Think

Education is a mechanism for merit-based class mobility. For all its flaws, America's public education system has raised millions out of poverty. Higher education advances civilizations, providing a forum for great thinkers to assemble and share deep specialized expertise. Dragons make no secret of their disdain for higher education. They ascribe the instillation of "woke" ideology in students to these institutions. They attack these institutions through lawsuits and smear campaigns. Reading between the lines, it is clear what dragonkind really wants: a sleeping, lobotomized populace. Treating objectivity as subjectivity and subjectivity as objectivity is a habit of dragons. In other words, they will call advanced mathematics woke, then turn around and treat conspiratorial thinking as objective truth, so long as it supports their financial and political goals.

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." - George Orwell

Ask any student how helpful it is to take notes using a pen and paper, and how their ability to remember lecture notes degrades when they're typed or recorded. The physical motion of writing connects neurons in much the same way as playing a musical instrument. When we do math by hand, the same phenomenon occurs. Writing is a slow enough process that it leaves space for cognition – understanding what we are writing. Typing, significantly less so. Every step we take to remove the physicality from an act removes some of our ability to cognize while doing it – to understand and integrate knowledge as we go.

Writing deliberately and slowly about things we've experienced, our opinions, or ideas shared by others activates motor neurons, sensory neurons, and mirror neurons. It strengthens our sense of identity, helping us better know ourselves, and our sense of cultural belonging.

Having an LLM write for us robs us of this affordance. Culture-less and intellectually benign, our identity is left up for grabs, our minds vessels ready to be filled with garbage: cheaply produced, derivative pop culture, cheaply produced fidget toys, cheaply produced neural network-generated music, cheaply produced reality TV, cheaply produced American flag pants, cheaply produced Punisher t-shirts, and Lee Greenwood and the Village People on repeat, because the draconic PR team has decided this is what we'll get and this is what we'll like.

Motive #2: Knowledge Tax Cuts

The first, is to make skilled knowledge workers irrelevant, then obsolete, or at least wield the threat of this over them, just as their elder dragons did to manufacturing workers in post-World War II America. Remember, dragons are willing to gamble on a future without innovation due to a failure to achieve AGI if it means that for the next few years they are able to extract maximum value out knowledge work by suppressing wages and normalizing waves of layoffs.

For blue collar workers, the message was "Foreigners are coming for your jobs". For knowledge workers, it is "AI is coming for your jobs". In both cases, the truth is being twisted: it is the dragons themselves culling jobs. Ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution, robber barons have cited automation as a great miracle of our modern age, immediately used it to lay off workers, then threatened the remaining overworked souls with the same fate. Rinse, repeat as necessary until arriving at late-stage capitalism, where 10% of the global population owns 85% of the wealth.

If it seems like this is obvious, and something they've done in broad daylight, it's because it is: Dragonkind does not feel peasants are worthy of a logical justification for their actions. As if for sport, they'll drum up imaginary justifications that defy their plainly obvious intent. Ultimately, value extraction is always the desired outcome.

COVID normalized remote work, giving humanity a taste of how much happier life can be when trading a commute for autonomy. There was just one major problem: This frustrated commercial real estate interests and city government officials who had grown used to rent and sweetheart tax revenue deals made with corporate executives. Did the dragons eat the cost of their leases? No, they invented a term called "return to office" (RTO), portrayed as if it was a foregone conclusion, and forced it into mainstream vernacular by spending large sums of money on puff pieces touting an imaginary "debate" between remote and in-person work. The point is, dragons are excellent at inventing ridiculous excuses and selling unreasonable things as reasonable through repetition and normalization.

The McDragon did something notably difficult though: It managed to double dip, living as a nepo-baby executive for the first half of its life, then spending its old age profiting by building a political platform fueled by the same feelings of economic fear and anxiety it had spent a lifetime creating.

Motive #3: "Everything Is Computer!"

When as a civilization, we cede our creative writing and speech to LLMs, we force human communication through a filter that tugs our words toward an uninspiring, safe, predictable, homogenized average.

Look no further than LinkedIn, which our economic desperation has transformed from a torrent of performative HR-friendly platitudes into an LLM-powered torrent of performative HR-friendly platitudes. To what end? Who is our audience? Who, specifically, are we "pleased to announce" our career news to? We're shouting into the ether at this point, and the only beneficiaries are LLM providers. It's the wrong game to play, we just haven't realized it yet. Ten years ago, this stuff counted and demonstrated tech savvy. Now it's a crowded room full of noise people didn't even bother to write themselves.

What's more, the accessibility and convenience of LLMs make them a tempting place for us to shift all creative work. The danger here is that "average" output isn't good enough in a world where positive societal change depends on inspiring, eloquent rhetoric from those worthy of being called our leaders. LLMs are a great equalizer, and equality is generally a good thing, but deprived of compelling visionaries like Abraham Lincoln emerging from the great beyond every once in a blue moon, our culture is cursed to exist in a state of perpetual stasis.

Consider this version of the "I Have A Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, as written by an LLM:

"Today, we come together to promote freedom, equality, justice, and opportunity for everyone. America was founded on the belief that every person deserves dignity, rights, and the chance to build a better future, yet discrimination and inequality continue to affect communities across the country. We must turn our shared values into meaningful action by addressing injustice, expanding opportunity, protecting civil rights, and building stronger, more inclusive communities. Progress requires urgency, cooperation, respect, and a commitment to positive change. By working together and rejecting division, we can create a future where people are judged by their character rather than their background, where every community has the opportunity to thrive, and where freedom and equality are not simply ideals, but realities for everyone."

While the spirit of the message holds true, many well-intentioned people had probably thought or said words like these prior to the emergence of Dr. King's leadership. Did they inspire millions of people to civil disobedience? When hearing that, did you feel your spirit rouse from complacency, inspired to participate in a social movement? Dr. King's message was amplified by his eloquence and the passion behind his words, themselves infused with the power of his lived, human experience, something LLMs can only simulate. Great movements are supported by great minds, and great minds are not conned by LLM output.

The homogenous LLM output we've quickly accepted as "good enough" out of convenience is stripped of spirit and too benign to inspire the necessary movements that shape our society. I fear that's the point.

Motive #4: History, Generated By The Victors

The threat does not end with language stripped of its inspirational power: These language models, if controlled or influenced by dragons, will conveniently censor or forget facts that are considered inconvenient or threatening to the narratives set forth by dragonkind, forever tipping the scales in their favor by portraying history as they deem fit. Look no further than Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 27B model, released to the public on August 14, 2026. As of this writing, it responds to questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre as follows:

Asking the same question, replacing 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre with the Boston Massacre results in the following:

Consider a future in which the dragons continue their siege of our American government, and exert control over American LLMs. Our grandchildren could study American History through a lens obscuring information about the acts of domestic terrorism that the McDragon led on January 6th, 2021. Instead, they'll be told of the heroism and ingenuity of God's chosen, the McDragon, and have Pavlovian panic attacks around the topics of wind turbines, pasteurized milk, and mail-in voting.

What happens when the dragons invade our villages and attempt to hide under a guise of "national security" to obfuscate the evidence of their misdeeds?

Motive #5: The Pen, Duller than the Sword

Insidiously, the proliferation of LLM generated content has transformed our psychology and sown seeds of doubt in the minds of humans receiving messages from other humans. While the burden of proof has, and should continue to land on those making claims, if we cannot uphold a social contract of creative authenticity, we are effectively aspiring to a future where every human sharing an idea is received with doubt, first and foremost. Humanity is already seeing this pattern when people exclaim: "That's AI!" while looking at actual photographs taken by actual photographers.

There is a difference between doubting an idea, and thinking critically about it. Doubt lives partially in our amygdala, also known as the "lizard brain". It is an emotional reaction to new information and a cognitive stonewall to overcome. Critical thought lives in the prefrontal cortex. It is an intellectual reaction to new information rooted not in fear, but curiosity.

There's no reason we shouldn't expect the likes of a dragon that would shout "Fake news!" or cosplay as a service worker to also call into question all inspiring counter-rhetoric in an attempt to cheapen and squash rising counter-movements.

Motive #6: Agents of Bureaucracy

It's widely accepted that most meetings tend to disrespect us by wasting our time, but consider for a moment a not-so-hypothetical analog:

Step 1) Person A uses an LLM to write a three page memo describing something that could have been communicated via a phone call or a two sentence email. They then send that three page memo to Person B.

Step 2) Person B then sees the three page memo and thanks to sown doubt, rightfully thinks "This is AI, I'm not reading this (AI;DR)."

Step 3) Person B then uses an LLM to generate cliff notes.

Step 4) Person B then goes to back to Step 1. Repeat ad infinitum.

Just as meetings allow us to disrespect each other's time, so too do LLMs, in an automated and infinitely scalable way. I am hoping a trend of rejecting this sort of communication becomes more socially acceptable. LLMs do the opposite of persuade, and this will become increasingly the case as people tune into their writing style and tune out their noise.

We need to say to one another: Do not send me LLM output. If you absolutely must, label it as such. I do not wish to spend inordinate amounts of time gazing upon the results of model collapse and generation loss in order that I may derive the crux of your messaging. I wish to see something as close to your original, raw idea, so please do not use LLMs until late in your ideation process, if you must. The earlier you use an LLM when you're defining an idea, the more generic and uninspiring the resulting representation of that idea will be. If an idea is unable to stand on its own merit without lipstick applied by an LLM, it was probably never worth reading to begin with. If it was, you've done yourself, and your concept, a massive disservice.

Even LLM providers have realized a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy is hot garbage – that's why they've introduced watermarking. They tell us it's to prevent plagiarism, but that's just the cover story. The real reason is because model providers are realizing that LLMs trained on the slop from other LLMs are dumber, and watermarking offers a way to mark anything that isn't "pre-LLM content" as tainted. When understanding motives, it helps to recall that altruism really doesn't exist for dragons. They couldn't care less if people are using their products for nefarious purposes, so long as subscription payments are made on time.

Motive #7: Automation of Parasocial Relationships

Parasocial relationships can be defined as a relationship in which one party feels a deep sense of connection to another party that sees it as transactional. They've become increasingly more common. Conversations with LLMs remove the human service provider from this equation, resulting in a uniquely inhuman experience that feels like human connection. What's more, that the inhuman party here is completely controlled by the dragons.

Post-WWII suburban sprawl has already physically divided America. The early Internet arrived with promises of unimaginable global connection. Instead, it helped usher in the death of third spaces. Now, LLMs threaten the integrity of the virtual forums that replaced our physical ones. Fostering a dependence on technology as a substitute for social connection is a way that dragonkind can continue to erode at the already frayed social fabric of America.

...And so Divided we Hunch, blank stares over flickering screens, simultaneously consuming and consumed by slop propaganda masquerading as journalism pitting We the People against one another in order that we remain divided, easily controlled, demoralized into believing dragonkind is a rightfully entitled, divinely ordained force.

This at last brings me to my thesis: This era will be remembered as a time when every product and service in America, including human capital and the concept of empathy, was scrapped for parts as the dragons do the only thing their kind has ever known how to do, extract value and market their acts of systemic theft and subjugation as righteous and benevolent. As with all religious frenzies, however, when the dust settles and nothing is left, humanity will be foisted into a new era.

Part 3: A Triumph for Authenticity

Hopefully the issues are clear. Now I'd like to share why I am optimistic in spite of these seemingly insurmountable odds. I believe we are currently living through a transition state as a civilization, and that authenticity will appreciate in value, ushering in a new era founded upon principles of verity and collective power over grift and individualistic pursuits. Instead of trying to escape our boiling pot, we can heave together, and remove it from the burner.

We're navigating the real Gulf of America, the gap between performative and meaningful work. Performative work focuses on signaling value through individual achievement (think networking events and public displays of grind and hustle culture, the 996 system, LinkedIn slop, self-promotion). Meaningful work focuses on creating value through acts of collective good (organic relationship building through a shared focus on quiet, heads down work, community-strengthening activities).

In spite of all this, difficult times expose the value systems of those living through them. In moments of chaos and despair, a solitary path forward often becomes clear. Leaders emerge as petty grievances among those mostly aligned in their values fade in contrast to a clear, common threat that must be addressed.

The Gravitational Collapse of Online Discourse

We're likely at the end of the era where any meaningful public discussion can be conducted via the Internet. I'm not sure this is bad news. The early information superhighway quickly had its construction signs replaced with billboards, commercialized, then propagandized beyond recognition. Social media platforms have not been trustworthy sources of information for over a decade. Now, LLMs are going to finish the job of eliminating any semblance of credibility the Internet could have had as a communications platform. This is a decades-long fever finally breaking.

This is an outcome the dragons themselves forced by forcing ads, propaganda, and LLM output into every element of our lives. It is an outcome we help enable every time we post LLM output in a public forum or unknowingly engage with bots. YouTube is compromised too. Videoconferencing will very likely be next, as technology matures enough to perform real-time streaming content manipulation. If that sounds far fetched, recall that so far, nothing has been sacred to those who wish to control and commoditize human interaction.

After decades of isolation, recently reinforced by a pandemic, neighbors are being cornered back into real-world interaction as the only viable means of trustworthy human engagement. Real-world conversations are by their very nature decentralized and heterogenous and yes, messy. This happens to work to our advantage by providing a bulwark against mass manipulation and propagandizing.

Moving Forward

It's no accident that young, intelligent political candidates are emerging and winning elections a decade after their aging champion was sidelined by establishment power. The vision of democratic socialism promoted by that champion still remains the best treatment for malignant capitalism, making America slightly more inhospitable to roving bands of mentally ill dragons and increasingly hospitable to the We the People. Political movements should not be fueled or measured by their possession or potential of capital, but by their potential benefit to the world. Weak attempts to liken these candidates to communists are about as helpful as cautioning the inhabitants of a burning building on the risks of water intoxication. The pendulum has simply swung too far in favor of the dragons, and apathy has proven as valuable as support to the dragons.

Voting for democratic socialist candidates at this juncture in American history does not make one a communist, it makes one a pragmatist, helping pull America back toward center.

A Call to Action (Hint: It Doesn't End With Elections)

In order to understand how to overcome dragons, it helps to understand their preferences:

  • convenient, time boxed, point-in-time, performative activism like single day protests, far from their gated communities and summer homes
  • civic engagement that ends on election night
  • voters as a means to an end (power) rather than a group that must constantly be negotiated with, respected, and feared

Dragons depend on apathy and civic disengagement. This is why the preservation of democracy cannot be treated as a point-in-time task, but an ongoing obligation. When we give them an inch, the dragons will take miles.

Keeping this in mind, how do we save our future from whatever nightmare dragonkind is brewing up next, and lay the groundwork for what comes after? To begin, it's helpful to review the motives behind the widespread push for LLM usage:

  1. To Write Is To Think: Erosion of the capacity for critical thought.
  2. Knowledge Tax Cuts: Workforce extortion via threats of automation.
  3. "Everything Is Computer!": Defanging of iconoclastic rhetoric.
  4. History, Generated By The Victors: Control over historical narratives.
  5. The Pen, Duller than the Sword: Capitalizing on mistrust of LLM output.
  6. Agents of Bureaucracy: Automating small acts of mutual disrespect.
  7. Automation of Parasocial Relationships: Simulating human connection.

We do not need to go on the offense to overcome dragons, what we need is a healthy social immune system. Instead of getting into the mud with them, we should analyze their motives in aggregate so that we may think of ways we can behave that are beneficial to the majority of us. This runs inherently counter to the goals of dragonkind.

At the risk of sounding prescriptive, I will say that I believe the answers lie not only in reactive protest, but in proactive patterns of behavior that have been lost to time. For example, we must engage in the simple act of getting to know our neighbors, lest others characterize them for us. Consider that for the first time in human history, social network algorithms caused us to meet over shared angst and controversy at scale, instead of over shared interests. Whenever possible, we must place our faith in word of mouth, conscientiously minimizing or eliminating the use of these toxic platforms. We already know that they spy on our behavioral patterns, location, and tastes. We know that they're responsible for a mental health crisis impacting our youth. Why would we reward this with more dependence? Ideally, we shouldn't require a centralized platform at all. A simple calendar or email list can suffice. Once we've made a habit of making time for local, recurring, in-person activities, the need for a platform vanishes. The subject doesn't really matter: Art. Music. Books. Martial Arts. Video Games. Yoga. Meditation. Weightlifting. Cooking. Dancing. There exist countless shared interests to commune over offline, we just need to prioritize it and make the time.

I would love to see businesses, libraries, and local municipalities open their doors for these sorts of engagements, free of charge. We need to start seeing the time spent on these activities, and the stronger community bonds that result, as an act of civic service, not a privilege afforded to the few who can afford the rent or the time to engage in them.

LLMs aren't going away either. In spite of everything I've said, they still have a place in engineering and research. Open models must become the most powerful and popular options. This era of closed, corporate/government hegemony over these artifacts of our collective human knowledge will ideally be short. The knowledge used to train these models belongs to all of humanity, and we must ensure it's represented accurately and completely. Open models allow for auditability, accountability, and extensibility.

Chasing trends or popularity or revenue is an foolish pursuit, with rules that will shift depending on the current cultural zeitgeist or corporate strategy. Defining these things never goes out of style. There has never been a better time double down on education, writing skills, social skills, emotional intelligence, and diving into the passions and hobbies that make us human. In a world where the idea of thought itself is being treated as “inefficient”, authenticity and an ability and eloquence around communicating new, bold ideas is the single greatest differentiator we have available to us.

For all their bluster and supposed economic genius, the dragons still haven't quite figured out that value creation is infinitely scalable, while value extraction has an expiration date. If you're disturbed by the rise of frat-boy hustle culture, and the creepy glorification and deification of "hunting" and "taking", you are far from alone.

We must travel light by minimizing or eliminating our debts, eating and sleeping well, and staying fit. An indebted, tires, out of shape populace is more vulnerable to economic manipulation and duress, and less able to make decisions that aren't rooted in fear or survival.

Dragons might have wings, but they're house cats: they hide away from us on private islands, in bunkers disguised as ballrooms, in towers of concrete and steel that they build as monuments to themselves. If we allow ourselves to travel light, we can soar higher than they can ever reach, and we'll be able to operate as a decentralized force for positive change, decreasingly dependent on the systems they own. The faith we put in ourselves and our communities must dwarf that which the dragons demand of their figureheads.

Culture is defined from the individual human upward, no matter what the dragons would prefer. National culture echoes local culture, like a fractal. If local culture is weak or nonexistent, national culture too will be weak or nonexistent, leaving corporate interests a vulnerability to exploit. Those that aren't socializing with their communities fall right into the arms of the algorithm's favorite provocateur podcasters.

There is no cavalry coming to save us, no institution that can survive without people willing to defend and maintain it. The good news is, we still have the power to do so.

Published by:

Michael J. Smalley