You Can’t Opt Out of AI. You Never Could.
The exit door is painted on. What I found when I went looking for a way out of the machine.
A note from Lawrence
At dinner, a friend I admire said quietly that she doesn’t use AI at all, and the table murmured its approval. I said nothing. I had more reason than anyone there to want her to be right: this technology pushed me out of a twenty-five-year career, and I’ve been rebuilding my life by becoming the thing that pushed me.
So I went looking for the exit, starting with an ordinary Tuesday. Her weather, her inbox, her coffee purchase, and her drive to work were all run through machine-learning models before she ever chose anything. The door out is painted on. The real questions are who controls the machine and who lives at the bottom of the hill it runs down.
