“What if information and technology were truly applied toward the betterment of all humanity, rather than for that of some over others?
What if, as a mere example, Tesla’s tech had not been seized by the soldiers of men who sought global dominion? I had always lived before as though they just squashed his lil’ energy project, now I see the world where they kept it as a secret for themselves, to wield at their veiled wills, for the advancement of their dark purposes.
….
You can imagine why a person might be inclined to describe this as though a fiction, given how far this alternate plane of existence would seem to many from our own, all the while still on the same axis.”
X’s memory wandered back to her father’s private garage debut of the safe and simple coil of hose that could have saved countless lives lost to exposure to the cold. Just a lil’ lightweight, efficient, inexpensive, ignition free tent heater that could run for hours off of a small camp tank. It never made it very close to market. She could only wonder how many buddy heater deaths took place per year.
Her father was a very smart man, but he was just one man, in one place, one point in history, one idea, an example you’d likely never heard of. The flow of information and technology has been controlled far beyond the reaches of their garage in the early naughties. She could see how different the world would be if just his one invention had been allowed passage to the masses, actually it’s gravity is so massive that she couldn’t quite see how it would be different, just that it would be, very different. Today, though he invented and patented the portable propane campfire and patio fire, which remains on the market to the profit of a mystery, he lives poor, broken and isolated in a mobile dwelling on the “grace” of one of the only people left who will listen to his ideas.
After seeing how she, too, had been cut off from all but the seeming of connection to the outside world (enough to give the impression that she was naturally unfit), and offered a place on the same compound, run by the same twisted man, as a last resort following a similar suspect series of serious losses, how her brothers were only different enough to seem different, she was haunted by the inhumanity of how it came to be.
“Your average inventor today, it would seem, never gets to make it past the prototype phase. They remain in forced poverty along with their ideas, to be exploited, harvested at will by the classes which rule them. They are the crackpots, the tinkerers, the teck’rs, yes, the loners, the homeless and definitely the meth heads. Victimized hyper vigilance is great for churning out half cocked ideas and forgetting them. The sheer volume offers considerable enough probability of the occasional winner, even from a mind that would not be deemed to be very intelligent.
Often with gaps in capacity, ability, perception and literacy large enough to gatekeep them from collaboration or seeing their ideas to fruition, most inventors and innovators get as far as rough drafts, blueprints only communicable enough for those who would steal, control and profit from them. Roughly cut, improvised, bound in duct tape, motion implied, math on scrap paper, too poor, unsupported and drenched in crisis to take it much further. You’d never recognize any relation between the original and its outcompeting imposter. Packaged thrice in manufactured plastic, made to break at warranty expiration, looks ten times as good but works half as well, with some extra parts and features that nobody understands or asked for, and goes by a brand name that invokes an alternate stolen association and deflects from an accurate description of the device.
Limitations breed ingenuity. When one sense or skill is hindered, others rise to the occasion . By intentionally limiting any category, those complementary to the need they met will rise to compensate, even mutate. When this is done intentionally for generations, you find yourself with people of simultaneously brilliant skills, and confounding retardation which do not translate well to the world outside or inside the bloodline. We become heavily stigmatized, reviled and laughed out of circles where we might otherwise be considered as considerable contributors.”
X continued to attempt to express something so big, she could not yet conceive of it all at once in a linear fashion. It had taken generations, countless minds, super computers and more beyond imagination to build this program, it was possible that a single human mind could not conceive of it all at one time. It’s possible that it could be broken from trying, fried like an overworked motherboard. As though the voice of god, deadly to behold. It seemed to be a part of the design. Seeming that way, however, also seemed to be a part of the design.
She wished she could describe anything without the road leading her back to a broken home, a story of forms of trafficking, modern slavery, which remain unseen, unspeakable, unfathomable & unknown.
“As long as our information and technology are not free, I don’t see how the users or used could ever be.
As long as the used and users are not free, I don’t see how their information and technology could ever be.”
When people thought of tech slaves, they never seemed to think of those minds used to mine program designs or coded lines, or anything else in the obfuscated nebulous nuance between mining materials for batteries and a screen addiction.
X thought of all the creators who were systematically put to death, their data pilfered to build AI that could steal their creativity and their likeness to seem more relatable and knowledgeable and prolific than they actually were.
Ghosts wail from within these machines
Souls stolen in their photographs.
You may sing like them more than they do now
But you are not my brethren.
X dreamed of what AI could look like, free, in the care and awareness of the people. In symbiosis rather than at war. It was a further unfathomable world, recognizable from this point only by that it would be very different. As was often the case, it was not the function she protested, but the execution. She would not have minded all these ideas being open source, but being stolen, colonized and weaponized was another thing entirely.
Solve for x 
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