I spent years working in technology. Not at the center of it — not in the rooms where the largest decisions were made — but close enough to see the shape of what was being built and to feel, even in the early days, that something essential was being traded away. I was not silent. I raised questions when I could, in the ways available to me. But I did not do enough, and I have had to sit with that. This book is, in part, my reckoning with that silence — a late attempt to say plainly what I sensed for a long time and did not say loudly enough, to enough people, while there was still more time to say it. I cannot help but feel I must carry the guilt for those who never will.
What I witnessed, from the inside, was an industry increasingly severed from what it means to be human. Not through malice in every case — that would almost be easier to understand. But through a kind of narrowing. A progressive loss of interest in anything that could not be measured, scaled, or monetized. The natural world, the rooted world, the world of neighbors and seasons and things grown by hand — these became irrelevant to the people building the systems that now govern so much of life. I watched that severance happen gradually, and then all at once, and I grieve it the way you grieve something you watched coming and could not stop. I am deeply ashamed of what I am a part of.
I remember the early internet — the moment when it was still possible to imagine it going differently. And I remember watching the first signs of what it would become: a young man building a website to rank women by their appearance, trading in humiliation for attention, and then trading that attention for something larger and more permanent. He was not alone, and he was not the last. Behind him, and behind so many others who followed the same pattern, were people with capital to deploy and no particular interest in what the deployment cost the rest of us. They called it investing. It had another name.
What they built together — platform by platform, algorithm by algorithm, data harvest by data harvest — was not progress. It was enclosure. The goals were always the same: change the world, do no evil, compassion for all. And there are many good people inside these companies who believe that is exactly what they are doing. They have no idea what is coming. They created a nightmare they paint in their minds as profound — and they gave their lives to it in good faith. Meanwhile, the ones who knew — the architects, the early profiteers — are quietly building bunkers, acquiring land, securing water, and planning to run while the tools they created finish the work they began.
I am an older woman now, living in a small mountain community in Virginia where people still grow things and know their neighbors and show up when it matters. I began this conversation with an AI — built by one of the very companies this book discusses — because I wanted to follow the logic honestly, wherever it led. What I found is recorded here. I did not write it to despair, though there is grief in every chapter. I wrote it because the truth, however dark, is the only thing that points toward anything real. And because the communities that will outlast what is coming are already here — quietly, stubbornly, irreducibly human — and they deserve to know what they are up against. May God help us all.
— Jo Massanari, Goshen, Virginia · March 2026
