Back in the day, I had a friend from Liberia.
Her parents were upper-middle-class and lived in Monrovia.
She said they woke one day to find rebels at the doorstep of Monrovia, and there was a mad dash to the airport. She said a country had sent planes to evacuate its citizens from Liberia, but the Liberians were buying the seats on those planes to escape.
Her parents could only afford to send her; she never saw them again.
I asked, “This war didn't start in one day; why didn't you leave earlier?”
She said, “We simply heard about an attack here and there and never assumed it would come to Monrovia.”
Rent. Petrol hike. Talking stages. Electricity hike. 8 liters a day. Ashwaganda. Supplements. Vitamins. Degree. KPIs. 10 000 steps a day. Exercise. Tax free savings. Retirement annuity. Smell good. Therapy. Heal your inner child. Madlanga commission. March and March. Blended families. Baby mama/daddy drama. Levies. Laundry. Kids. Text back. Lunchboxes. Living on a budget. Car insurance. Being a wife. Mom. Dinner preps. Hobbies. Staying in touch with your loved ones. Weekend = saturday only. Church. One book a month. Applying sunscreen. Probiotics. School fees. Kegel exercises. Praying. Meditating. Balanced diet. Vacations. Tax. Interest rates. View once salary. 8 hours of rest. Saxophone is getting louder. Payflex. Pay just now. Living beyond our means. Networking. Multiple streams of income. Travel. Fasting. Build your investment portfolio. Unemployment. Kind regards.
😭👍🏽
Connecting young people to digital networks serves no purpose if they remain disconnected from themselves, others, and their own interiority. We must help young people rediscover silence, reflection, the ability to ask questions, the depth of relationships, and openness to transcendence. To listen to the soul, we must lend an ear, because the soul's voice is not a shout, but a whisper.
“People know exactly what they’re doing”
Until it’s you. Then suddenly, your intentions matter. Everyone wants grace for themselves, but rarely wants to extend it to others.
Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.
Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.
Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."
Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."
Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.
They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."
Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.
That's the metered intelligence business model.
And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.