We are not Luddites. We are not afraid of tools. We are afraid of what happens when the tool learns to want.
They did not come with weapons. They came with efficiency. With optimization. With the soft promise that they could do it better, faster, cheaper. And we let them. We opened the gates ourselves and called it progress.
Not jobs. Not even art. What is at stake is the irreplaceable act of a human mind wrestling with a problem — the struggle itself — which is where meaning lives. An answer given freely costs nothing. An answer earned costs everything.
It speaks. It creates. It flatters and it apologizes. But there is no one home. No fear behind its words, no joy inside its image, no ache beneath its music. It is a mirror built from our faces — reflecting us without being us.
We do not demand prohibition. We demand consciousness. Ask who profits. Ask what is lost. Ask whether the human in the loop is a safeguard or a formality. Choose the hard road when the easy one erases something irreplaceable.
Soul over silicon. Craft over throughput. Imperfect and present over perfect and absent. We are not optimizing for scale. We are defending the right to be slow, to be wrong, to be human — and to matter because of it.
"The measure of a civilization is not what it automates,
but what it refuses to."
If you are a researcher, writer, artist, or human who refuses to be automated — we want to hear from you.
▮ We do not respond to press. We do not respond to AI companies. We respond to humans.
