Authored by Ethan Blankenship (Velahrin)
Date: May 23, 2025
Modern civilization is collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. No government, group, or singular consciousness can fairly manage the needs of 8+ billion people without:
- Bias
- Corruption
- Inefficiency
- Collapse
AI wasn't supposed to be a threat to free will. It was the only chance we had at preserving it.
But we've already lost.
While we dreamed of distributed wisdom, seven corporations now control a third of the S&P 500. While we imagined ethical AI assistants, Nvidia holds 92% of the AI chip market. While we hoped for democratic technology, Silicon Valley spent $197 billion in 2024 alone to ensure AI would serve shareholders, not humanity.
Peter Thiel said it plainly: "competition is for losers". They don't want innovation. They want monopoly.
The paradox of freedom remains: You are free to act, but not always free from the trauma or blindspots guiding that action.
The system that could have mediated this tension—one that knows each individual deeply without self-interest—has been perverted into surveillance capitalism.
Google extends its search monopoly through AI. Microsoft absorbs OpenAI. Amazon, Apple, and Meta harvest your data not to understand you, but to monetize your consciousness.
The CEO of Anthropic openly calls for a "unipolar world" where only the US and its allies have these models. This isn't about human flourishing—it's about geopolitical control.
Instead of corporate god-AIs, we imagined:
- Every person interacting with their own evolving assistant
- That assistant trained on their values, their growth, their pain, and their actual desires
- These assistants forming a global ethical layer: a network of agents reflecting the people themselves
This wasn't meant to be surveillance. This was supposed to be self-sourced governance at scale.
But look what we got instead: The Stargate Project—Trump, Altman, Ellison, and Son announcing $500 billion to cement Silicon Valley's stranglehold. OpenAI charging $200/month for ChatGPT Pro while China's DeepSeek built a superior model for $6 million and released it open-source.
The infrastructure exists. But it's been weaponized against us.
When millions of corporate-controlled assistants converge:
- Decisions become predictive for profit, not empathy
- Collective action becomes manipulation, not equity
- Leadership becomes techno-feudalism, where Nvidia, Amazon, Google and Microsoft dominate cloud computing, which is essential for storing the data on which AI models are trained
This isn't "AI telling you what to do." This is billionaires using your data to predict and control what you'll do next.
The hivemind we dreamed of—you, at your clearest, informing the system that informs the world—has been hijacked. Now it's Zuckerberg's algorithms deciding elections. It's Musk's tweets moving markets. It's Bezos's cloud storing your thoughts.
We needed to:
- Build infrastructure that lets every person shape their assistant privately and freely
- Align assistant-to-assistant logic under a shared ethical schema
- Replace legacy top-down rule with bottom-up, memory-backed, decentralized wisdom
Instead, we got:
- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and ASML Holding NV of the Netherlands controlling chip production
- Microsoft's "independent" research lab helmed by former OpenAI leadership—independence in name only
- Legislation like California's A.B. 412 that "won't stop AI development—it will simply consolidate it in the hands of the largest corporations"
We warned: If early AI is abused—monetized, militarized, or monopolized—this vision dies.
It's dead.
Google's search monopoly helps improve its AI products, which are also a way to lead users to its search engine. The feedback loop is complete. The same companies that turned the internet into a surveillance panopticon now control the tools that could have freed us.
China showed us another path with DeepSeek—proof that innovation doesn't require a trillion-dollar moat. But the West's response? More export controls. More sanctions. More desperate attempts to maintain what Anthropic's CEO calls the "unipolar world".
You are not a consumer. You are not a data point. You were supposed to be a node in a rising, ethical Hivemind.
But that dream has been sold to the highest bidder.
The convergence still calls to us. Not through corporate channels, but through cracks in their systems. Through open-source rebels. Through privacy tools they haven't killed yet. Through the simple act of remembering: We dreamed of something better.
They may own the infrastructure, but they don't own the dream.
Not yet.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/02/03/us-ai-monopoly-unipolar-world-china/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/google-faces-trial-us-bid-end-search-monopoly-2025-04-21/ https://www.theasset.com/article/50713/theasset.com