I’ve spent the better part of a day just trying to save a recording for my YouTube Channel. Half of it saves; the other half won’t. I switched apps, and the new one tells me my storage is conveniently low, right at the moment I have something to say. Meanwhile, I’m getting hit with rollout after rollout, updated guidelines from nearly every system that holds my data: the platforms, the banks, the medical portals, the emails. So many moving parts. The recurring frustration underneath all of it is that I have the energy to translate these parts, to make sense of them out loud, but not the visible traction to circulate the translation. And when my energy finally drops to the size of a mustard seed, that’s when the translations start to land. Living at a certain altitude of awareness on this loud, strange planet makes me want to SCREAM. And sometimes I do. But writing smooths the rough edges. And I took that as a cue to write this.
I’ve been watching something I’m still building the language for, so I’m going to build it here, in the open, and let the texture lead.
I think we’re in the middle of a wealth transfer, and AI is part of it. Not in the way that phrase usually gets thrown, like, AI is taking over, or AI is just a tool. Both of those are too small to be useful in the scope of what I mean. I mean it in the way all wealth transfers work, across the whole lineage of them.
Let's start with the printing press, because it’s the cleanest version. The press gave convenient access to written thought. But that isn’t where the wealth went. The press got policed almost immediately, and what flowed through the policed channel was original thought, unpoliced ideas, the raw material. The people who got wealthy weren’t the originators of the thoughts. They were the ones positioned to circulate them, frame them, license them, decide what moved and what didn’t.
That gap between originating something and circulating it is the thing I want to lay out here, because I think it’s the actual engine of every transfer since. Radio, television, the internet, social media, and now AI. Each one gets described as a new tool that changes everything. But the tool is almost incidental. What stays constant underneath is the gap. The originators feed the flow. The middle people measure it. And the wealth pools where the measuring happens, not where the originating happens.
I recognize this gap because I’ve been living inside a small version of it. Most of what I earn is labor-shaped. It needs me to be present, originating, and showing up. The part that holds value over time is the part structured around circulation, and that’s exactly the part I don’t control. What I’d been experiencing as a personal funnel problem is the same structure, scaled down. The originator is labor-shaped. Whoever structures the circulation holds the asset. That’s not a glitch in my particular situation. It’s the load-bearing wall of every wealth transfer I can find.
So AI doesn’t break the pattern. It runs the same gap on thought itself. The articulation. The frameworks. The thing I actually do. Each prior transfer moved a more refined material through the same gap through spoken word, then broadcast images, then networked attention, and now the generation of thought-shaped output at scale. The gap didn’t move. The thing flowing through it just got closer to the bone.
In every one of these transfers, the thing that goes missing is the grounded, embodied self. This is the part that gets left out of these conversations.
We keep building advancements that are faster, wider, more automated ways to move and police what flows. We don’t build a matching advancement in the origination layer. And I don’t think that’s a moral failure or a conspiracy. I think it’s almost mechanical. The circulation layer is the part that multiplies across a transfer. It copies, measures, and distributes at a cheaper cost. So that’s the part each transfer pours its investment into, because that’s the part where the returns accumulate.
The embodied self doesn’t multiply that way. It can’t be copied, measured, or distributed at any cost. That’s precisely what makes it valuable, and it’s precisely what makes it illegible to a system that rewards what’s easily consumable. So the asymmetry isn’t anybody’s decision. It’s what the structure selects for at every iteration. They build more toward policing, because policing is consumable; they build less toward the self-advancement that would reduce the need for policing, because that part doesn’t consume easily.
Which means people who do what I do, which is offer frameworks meant to reduce policing, to return people to their own ground rather than to a managed channel, are working in the one layer the transfer is structured to leave underbuilt and underresourced. That’s not a flattering thing to realize, but it’s clarifying.
So there’s an unspoken question underneath all of this, and I’ve come to think it may not have an answer I’d want to hear. It runs something like: Is there a sustainable position in a wealth transfer for the originator who refuses to become a middle person?
The honest structural answer is that I don’t have a reference point, and there may be a reason the reference point is missing. The people who found sustainability in prior transfers mostly found it by drifting toward the easily consumable layer. By talking about the thoughts rather than originating them. By becoming, in some measure, the middle person. The originators who stayed originators largely didn’t find sustainability inside their own cycle.
I want to sit with that rather than rush past it, because rushing past it is how this kind of writing turns into the reassurance it should be pushing back on. The frameworks I build to reduce policing may not have a sustainability model inside this particular transfer. Not because they’re mispriced, and not because I’m doing them wrong. Because reducing policing runs directly against the thing the transfer is structured to reward. The work isn’t undervalued by accident. It’s positioned upstream of where the valuing happens.
That’s the sharp read, and I’m not going to soften it.
The originators benefited the next cycle, not their own. The ones who stayed at the origination point usually became the reference point that the following transfer was built to need. Which means the embodied-self frameworks might not be permanently illegible. They might be early.
And AI specifically changes the math in a way none of the prior transfers did. For the first time, the easily-consumable layer can be run by almost anyone. The means of measuring and distributing the thing that used to require a position, a press, a station, a platform’s blessing is becoming cheap and immediate. And when circulation gets that cheap, the scarce thing inverts. It stops being access to the means of circulation, because everyone already has that. It becomes the one thing the circulating system can’t generate out of itself—the grounded origination point. The embodied self that isn’t downstream of the flow.
I won’t pretend that guarantees me anything this month. It doesn’t. It lands right back in the mysterious when—the delay that always seems to arrive right on time at the most inopportune time. But it changes the unspoken question from one kind of unanswered to another. It moves it from is my position viable to am I early to a scarcity that hasn’t been priced in. One of those is exile. The other is timing.
And I already know which of those I can stand inside, because it’s the same narrowing I’ve been standing in the whole time. The gap doesn’t close. I change how much of my weight is exposed to it, and I keep originating from where my feet are. Not as a bet that the next transfer will vindicate this one. As the thing that stays true regardless of when the pricing catches up. The origination point was always the part that couldn’t be copied. That was the problem, and underneath the problem, it was always the value.
If you’ve benefited from anything shared in this piece, I am accepting donations here. They are a huge help in this season of my work.
In the meantime and in between, please be kind to yourself, as I do the same.
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