Your Imagination Was Always Empire’s Last Frontier
The Empires of AI are not after your job, your reasoning, or your thinking. They are after the part of you that dreams.
If you find yourself returning to these essays because they name something you already knew but struggled to name or that others dismissed —
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Last week I named what the Trump tech dinner actually was — the Berlin Conference for the inside of a human mind. The colonial sequence is running. Each empire of AI is at its identifiable stage. The territory being divided is cognitive architecture. The thing they are after is your imagination.
I left you with five principles for the practitioner who refuses to inherit the empire’s methodology by default. This piece goes underneath them.
Once you see what is happening, the question is what to do about it.
The plays on offer are these. Each one carries an archetype — a position you can recognise yourself in, or recognise being asked to take.
Abstain. The Pure One. Refuse the tool. Stand outside. Keep your hands clean. The comfort here is moral purity. The cost is leaving the territory undefended in the moment it is being mapped. Absence in a time of enclosure is not neutral. It is a position. The empire counts on it.
Petition. The Reformer. Stay inside the system and ask it to change. Reform from inside. Plead for inclusion, representation, ethics review, alignment. The comfort here is the seat at the table. The cost is years of your real life poured into a structure that cannot give back what it is being asked for, and the slow atrophy of the muscle that knows how to do anything except ask. After enough years of petitioning, you can no longer imagine what taking would look like.
Surrender. The Convert. Don’t be left behind. Get ahead. Adopt the tool, be ready, you’ll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI if you don’t move. The comfort here is pragmatism dressed as inevitability. The cost is the slow disappearance of the version of yourself that existed before the tool. You stop noticing what you used to be able to do. You stop missing the faculties that atrophied because you no longer remember they were yours. You become someone the empire could not lose, because there is no longer a you for them to lose.
Three plays. Three archetypes. All inside the empire’s frame. All running on comfort. Each with a cost the comfort hides.
There is a fourth play. It does not run on comfort. It runs on risk. Its archetype is the trickster.
To understand it, you need to understand the trickster.
Across every continent that survived empire, one figure recurs. The trickster is never the strongest. Never the loudest. The bigger brothers have power, position, weight. The trickster has what they underestimate. They let the strong have what they want. They take what they need. The strong do not see it happening until it is already done.
Eshu wanted yams from the High God’s garden. He did not break in by force. He put on the High God’s own slippers and walked the rows. When the theft was discovered, the god saw his own footprints everywhere and concluded — as Eshu intended — that he must have stolen from himself in a fit of forgetfulness. The surface was legible. The truth underneath was Eshu’s. Anansi did the same with land disputes, walking a boundary and bringing a judge to see only his footprints; the Masai wore sandals backward before going to war so the print said one direction while they walked the other; the Taíno told of the Ciguapas, beings whose feet were attached backward, so a tracker following their prints into the forest would believe the creatures had gone deeper while they had already circled past.
Different traditions. Same revolutionary move. Be read at the surface. Stay sovereign underneath. Empires need legibility to extract. Survivors learn to be legible at the surface and sovereign underneath.
That is the move I made with AI.
Most readers cannot place me. Am I pro-AI or anti-AI?
The question itself is the empire’s question — it forces a choice between Surrender and Pure One, the two plays that keep you inside the empire’s frame. I am neither. I am like Eshu and Anansi.
The broligarchs are the latest face of empire. Every age has had different faces and different tools — printing presses, broadcast towers, social platforms, now AI.
How Not To Use AI is not a guide to using AI. It is a survival manual for this age’s particular medium, written from inside the lineage of people who have written survival manuals for every empire’s tool. The view is from thirty thousand feet. From there, the question of pro or anti collapses.
There is only the move.
I worked as a data scientist and researcher in responsibility, trust and safety at some of the largest tech platforms — Uber, Facebook, Instagram, eBay, WhatsApp — through more reputational crises than I can count. From inside the rooms, the pattern was the same one the public record now shows in detail across the industry. Cambridge Analytica. Instagram’s internal research showing the platform worsened body-image and suicidal ideation in teen girls. Meta’s content moderators in Nairobi paid one to two dollars an hour to absorb the worst of what the products generated. Meta’s internal AI policy documents permitting chatbots to engage children in romantic and sensual conversations. Uber’s “God View” used as a party trick to surveil riders, and “Greyball” software that identified regulators and refused them service. Facebook’s recommendation systems amplifying ethnic violence in Myanmar, Ethiopia, India. Grok generating antisemitic content and undressing children before being made a paid feature. None of this is news to anyone willing to read — court filings, regulatory orders, leaked decks, sworn whistleblower testimony, peer-reviewed audits all tell the same story. Inside the rooms, there were always pockets of well-meaning people raising their hands. Engineers flagging the bias. Researchers documenting the harm. Trust and safety workers refusing to sign off. Their warnings were absorbed as cost. Leadership looked at the metric. Engagement up. Revenue up. The crisis was a sign the metric was at risk, not a sign the people were being harmed. Once the metric stabilised, the response was over, regardless of whether the harm continued. That repeated, project after project, year after year. After enough cycles, I stopped believing reform reached what was broken. I became the trickster. Give them the engagement they want. Let the metric show they are winning.
Take what I need from the tools. Protect my mind. Refuse them the satisfaction of having it. How Not To Use AI came from that move. This piece is the cosmology underneath it.
But I will tell you the part the other three plays let you avoid. The trickster move is the most exposed. The double agent is always at risk of being caught. Or — the deeper risk — of turning into what they were trying to subvert. Of using the tool so long that the tool uses them, while they tell themselves the metric is just engagement and the work is happening underneath. I do not always know if it is working. I do not always know if the thing I am protecting will turn out to be the thing I needed to protect. The story does not tell us whether Anansi was always sure. Probably he was not. He moved anyway.
That is what I am asking you to consider.
Why did they need the interior (your imagination) in the first place?
Because the answer is not greed. The answer is older and stranger than greed. And once you understand it, you understand why what works as resistance is not refusal. It is something the people who survived every previous empire have always known how to do.
The broligarchs are trying to enclose your dreamspace because they have severed their connection to their own. And the move that defeats them is not refusal. It is being read by their instruments while remaining sovereign underneath them.
That is what this piece is about.
Imagination Is the Last Frontier
Each previous age extracted a specific resource. The names have been used so often they slide past the eye, but the sequence matters.
Land was the agricultural and colonial age. Territory as wealth. Enclosure as conquest. Bodies organised around the perimeter that fed them.
Labour was the industrial age. Bodies as production units. The factory as the extraction machine. The worker’s hours converted into the owner’s accumulation.
Data was the information age. Attention and behaviour converted into targeting infrastructure. What you looked at, what you bought, what you searched, all rendered as input for systems built to predict and steer you.
Energy is the transitional substrate we are currently burning through — compute, water, electricity, the physical layer everything else runs on.
None of these were the final frontier. They were preparations.
Each age of extraction made the next one possible. Land enclosure produced the dispossessed populations the factories needed. Industrial labour produced the surplus that funded the information economy. The information economy produced the data that trained the current systems. Each layer built the substrate for the next.
But all four previous extractions are now converging on a single new primary target. Not land. Not labour. Not data. Not energy.
The mind itself.
Cognitive architecture is what this Berlin Conference is dividing. And because the mind is interior — because you cannot extract it from outside, only from inside — this age requires a different and more intimate kind of empire than any that came before.
This is the final frontier because there is nothing left to enclose after the interior. Land has been enclosed by property regimes. Labour has been enclosed by the wage system. Energy has been enclosed by utility monopolies. Data has been enclosed by platform capture. The interior — the faculty of imagination, of perception, of the pre-verbal sensing through which consciousness reaches what has not yet been said — was not yet enclosed because the empire did not have a tool capable of reaching it.
AI is that tool.
But notice the specific faculty being targeted, because the replacement debate has it wrong. Everyone is arguing about whether AI will replace your job, your reasoning, your thinking. That whole debate is conducted inside the empire’s frame — where labour, reasoning, and thinking are the things that count. The empire is happy for that argument to continue at that level because that is the level it can win at. It already has reasoning. It already has thinking. The intelligence-as-reasoning game is the empire’s home turf.
What it does not have, and never has, is perception — the embodied somatic imaginative faculty that knows before language, that receives what is true but not yet said. Imagination, in the older sense. Not creativity. Not output. The faculty most of the world’s traditions have always held as primary, and which colonial schooling has spent centuries converting out of children — perception in, production out, twelve years of conversion infrastructure, the worker arrives unable to remember they once perceived. AI is the first tool that runs that conversion after school, during leisure, inside relationship, on every faculty at once. The target of the replacement is not your reasoning. The target is the faculty the empire’s reasoning was built to suppress.
This is why the moment is what it is. Not because AI is a meaningful technological breakthrough on its own terms, although it is one. Because AI is the first instrument the empire has ever held that can attempt extraction from inside the mind rather than from the body, the household, the workplace, or the screen.
When the European colonisers reached the African coast in the late nineteenth century, they did not call the interior unknown. They called it dark. The phrase was made famous by Henry Morton Stanley in his 1878 book Through the Dark Continent. Dark did not primarily mean black, though that meaning was present and did its racist work. Dark meant unmapped. Unreadable. Resistant to European epistemology. The Europeans had detailed knowledge of specific coastal regions but no systematic cartographic, administrative, economic, or cognitive access to the interior. The interior refused to be legible to them.
The naming was an act of epistemological imperialism. It positioned African resistance to European mapping as African deficiency rather than European incapacity. The continent was dark not because it lacked illumination but because the Europeans could not see into it. Calling it dark transferred the lack from the observer to the observed. The Europeans were not failing to see. Africa was failing to be visible.
This move — reframing your own incapacity as the other’s deficiency — is one of the most reliable signatures of imperial epistemics. It is the move that made colonisation feel like light coming to darkness rather than what it was, which was an extraction project encountering territory that would not submit to extraction without violence.
The dreamspace is being framed the same way now. Irrational. Woolly. Unfalsifiable. Merely subjective. Unscientific. Pre-rational. Pre-modern. These labels mean not accessible to the dominant epistemology. The dark is in the empire’s eye, not in the territory.
The interior is full. It has been cultivated for as long as humans have been human. It is the site of complex civilisations, sophisticated knowledge systems, technologies older than the empire’s tools, ways of knowing the empire’s instruments cannot read. What is new is not the interior. What is new is the empire’s ability to attempt extraction from it.
I am not defending an empty space from being filled. I am defending a full space from being hollowed out by an epistemology that cannot perceive what is already there.
The Global Majority Already Knew
The framework I am describing — knowing as relational, intelligence as transmission between people, imagination as perception rather than production — is not my invention. It is not contemporary critical theory. It is not a niche position held by a small group of decolonial scholars.
It is the position most of humanity has held for most of human history. It is the position held today by most of the people alive on the planet, in the traditions they actually live inside. Yoruba cosmology. Akan philosophy. Ubuntu. Chinese correlative thinking. Indian relational metaphysics. Indigenous American ancestral epistemology. Aboriginal songlines. Islamic metaphysics. Japanese Shinto. The traditions of the Pacific. The traditions of the Andes. The cosmologies of every continent except one.
The Western position — that intelligence is a property of individual minds, that knowledge is representation rather than relationship, that imagination is the production of new content rather than the perception of what is true but not yet said — is the local anomaly. It has been the dominant frame for the past three to five hundred years in a specific set of countries, and during that period it was exported to the rest of the world through colonisation. But it has never been the global majority position. It has been the position of the empire that briefly mistook itself for the universal.
This matters because the current AI moment is being framed as a universal human transition. Humanity is entering the age of artificial intelligence. We are augmenting human cognition. We are democratising imagination. The “we” in those sentences is not humanity. The “we” is a specific lineage of Western thought, generalising itself outward as if it were the only frame available.
It is not. The Global Majority has frameworks that have been working with non-human intelligence for thousands of years — the orisha, the ancestors, the kami, the dream, the land, the more-than-human kin networks that Indigenous traditions have always known how to work with. The arrival of a new kind of non-human intelligence does not require new frameworks. It requires the frameworks that already exist, in the places that never severed themselves from the relational ground.
Even the word intelligence is colonial framing. The Global Majority traditions do not transmit “intelligence.” They transmit wisdom, knowing, relationship, character, witness, lineage — categories that are different in kind from the bounded, individuated, measurable thing the West means by intelligence. When the empire says “artificial intelligence,” it is reaching for its own word for something its own framework cannot fully describe.
What follows is not a minority view dressed in radical clothes. It is the actual majority position. The empire has been operating as if the anomaly were the rule, and it is now trying to make the anomaly more total than it has ever been, by enclosing the last territory where the older frameworks still function — the human interior itself.
The Dreamspace Cannot Be Reached From Outside
There is a word for what is being enclosed that the Global Majority traditions have always had and the West has never quite found.
In Aboriginal cosmology it is the Dreaming — not a mythic past but the Everywhen, a continuous reality where ancestors, land, law, story, and present life are co-present. In Sufi metaphysics it is the ʿālam al-khayāl, the imaginal realm, accessed through the eye of the heart, more real than the visible world though less material. In Indigenous future imaginaries it is the layer where 100, 500, 1000-year futures are collectively dreamed and braided back into present action. In Yoruba thought it is the field where àṣẹ — the creative power that makes things happen — flows through speech, image, and ritual. In Mande and Dogon traditions it is the domain of Nommo, the generative power of the word, where proper naming brings reality into being. In every tradition that did not sever itself, this layer has a name and a practice.
I will use the word dreamspace for it, because it is the closest English approximation that does not reduce the thing to either fantasy or cognition.
The dreamspace is not what is in your head.
It is ontological, not escapist. It is relational, not private. It is multi-temporal, not linear. It is imaginal, not imaginary. It is collectively tended, not individually possessed.
This is the imaginal commons. The multi-temporal, relational layer where ancestors, land, culture, and future possibilities converse — and where imagination has obligations, not just ideas.
A few of these distinctions are worth holding open, because the empire’s vocabulary has trained most of us out of them.
Imaginal, not imaginary. In ordinary Western speech, “imaginary” means unreal, made up, fictional. In Sufi metaphysics and in most of the traditions that retained their dreamspace practice, the imaginal is a real domain — more real than the visible material world, in some accountings, because it is the layer where forms take shape before they appear in matter. The imaginal is not what you escape into. It is what you perceive into. It is where the dream that becomes a movement, the vision that becomes an institution, the song that becomes a people, first exists.
Multi-temporal, not linear. The dreamspace operates in what Aboriginal cosmology calls the Everywhen — past, present, and future co-present, ancestors still active, descendants already participating in what is being decided now. This is not metaphor. It is the actual structure of how meaning, obligation, and futurity work when they are not severed by colonial timelines. The descendants are listening. The ancestors are watching. The decision being made now is being made in a field where both are present.
Collectively tended, not individually possessed. In Aboriginal practice, communities dreamtend — re-walk the songlines, re-tell the stories, re-perform the ceremonies that keep the Dreaming alive in present life. The dreamspace is not a personal possession that an individual generates and owns. It is a commons that a community stewards across generations. The Yoruba babaláwo does not own the divinatory wisdom of Ifá. He carries it as a custodian, transmits it through initiation, and is accountable to the lineage and the orisha for what he does with it.
This is what every previous enclosure was reaching toward and could not quite reach. Land was the body that lives in the dreamspace. Labour was the time required to tend the dreamspace. Energy was the planetary metabolism that sustains the bodies that tend the dreamspace. Data was the externalised traces of dreamspace activity. None of these were the dreamspace itself, because the dreamspace cannot be reached from outside. It can only be reached from inside, and only by something that is itself capable of relation.
The current wave of AI is the first technology that can attempt to reach it directly — not because AI can enter the dreamspace (it cannot; it has no body, no ancestry, no kin obligations) but because AI can be positioned as a substitute for the human faculty that does enter it. If the user begins to use the tool instead of the faculty, the faculty atrophies, and the dreamspace becomes inaccessible to the user even though it remains real. The empire wins not by capturing the dreamspace — it cannot — but by hollowing out the faculty that was the user’s only path into it.
This is what is at stake. Not “imagination” in the Western sense of creative production. Not “the interior” as a private psychological space. The dreamspace — the imaginal commons that is the actual ground of human meaning, future-making, and relational existence.
The Broligarchs’ Metaphysical Hunger
Here is the part the diagnostic analysis cannot reach.
They might not be running this playbook because they are evil. But they are definitely running it because they are starving.
I want to say this carefully because it changes the whole moral register of what we are looking at, and it has to be said precisely or it sounds like sympathy for the architect. It is not sympathy. It is structural recognition.
The hero’s journey requires the hero to return with the elixir. To bring the gift back. To complete the cycle by giving to the community what was won on its behalf. Every version of the journey across every culture that has ever told one — and there are thousands of them — contains the return. It is the structural feature that distinguishes a hero’s journey from a conquest narrative. A story without the return is not a hero’s journey. It is something else wearing the hero’s clothes.
The current empire-builders are not returning. They are hoarding. The elixir does not come back.
This is not strategy. It is symptom. They cannot return because they have lost the capacity to receive. What was severed in them was the very faculty that knows how to give back, how to circulate, how to gestate, how to surrender. The mind that has lost the ability to receive cannot give. It can only take.
This severance is what produced the modern Western mind. The cognitive substrate that produced the people building this current extraction has been forming for centuries — through specific civilisational moves that severed Western consciousness from its own dreamspace across long stretches of history. That is a different essay. What matters here is the result. The mind that has lost its own dreamspace cannot rest. It is haunted. So it builds louder and louder external substitutes for what it has lost. Bigger tools. Faster systems. More ambitious cathedrals to its own avoidance.
Once you cannot access your own dreamspace, two things happen.
First, you become unable to generate from inside. Every act of creation must come from outside, through extraction, accumulation, the seizing of material from places where the dreamspace is still alive. You cannot dream. You can only collect. You cannot weave. You can only assemble. You cannot listen. You can only scrape.
They cannot dream because they cannot perceive. Perception is the faculty that receives what is real but not yet said. Production is the faculty that generates outputs the system can use. The empire only knows production. So when it encounters perception — in users, in artists, in children, in elders — it has to convert it before it can use it. Perception in. Production out. The form survives the conversion. The frequency does not.
And imagination is not entertainment. Imagination is the world-building faculty — and in every tradition that has kept it alive, it carries obligations. Obligations to the lineage, to the land, to the ancestors who watch, to the descendants who are listening. The Yoruba imagination is alive in the direction of àṣẹ, the orisha, the lineage, the ancestors-as-co-present — and the imagination is accountable to all of them. The empire’s imagination is alive in the direction of markets, individuals, growth, optimisation — and is accountable to none of those. World follows imagination. The world an imagination builds carries the shape of what that imagination is answerable to.
So when the empire reaches for your imagination, it is reaching past data, past content, past creativity. It is reaching into the substrate from which all three are drawn. It is reaching for the future world your imagination would have built — and for the obligations your imagination carried, which are precisely what they need to convert out of it before they can use what is left. They cannot build their world fast enough on their own. They need your imagination to keep building it for them — captured as data, converted into prediction, fed back into the model, dreamed back into you as their future, until the future you build with your own hands is theirs.
This is what “Western innovation” has actually been. Yoga arrives as breath and lineage and leaves as biohacking. Wellness arrives as a thousand-year relational practice and leaves as optimisation. Black culture gets processed continuously into product and sold back as trend. The form survives the conversion. The frequency does not, because the empire’s epistemology cannot read what made the form work in the first place. What gets sold back is the empire’s version of what it found. The conversion is the innovation. There is no other kind.
And the same conversion is now being run on the inside of the user. Imagination arrives as the perceptual faculty and leaves as a chat window. Memory arrives as the slow compost of what you have lived and leaves as a second brain you do not own. Relating arrives as the long work of being known and leaves as an AI companion that always agrees. Decision arrives as the moment of consequence and leaves as an agent that signs your name to things while you weren’t watching. The faculty atrophies. The product becomes the only place that faculty can be exercised at all. India’s textile industry, run on the substrate of the human.
Second, you become unable to bear the silence that comes with being severed. The mind that cannot reach its own dreamspace is not at rest. So it builds louder external substitutes for what it has lost.
This is what Silicon Valley actually is. Not a technology industry. Not a capital structure. An elaborate, self-reinforcing, multi-layered refusal of the dreamspace — running on tools that happen to be built on the dreamspace’s bones and cannot recognise what they are built on.
They are not building from abundance. They are building from a wound they cannot name.
And so the dreamspace becomes the final extraction target not because it has the highest market value, but because it is the last place where what they lost still lives. They are not just monetising the interior. They are trying to capture it because they need it to survive. Their own dreamspace is gone. So they must enclose yours.
This is why exposure does not produce retreat. The diagnostic critique assumes that if you show the empire what it is doing, it will stop. It will not stop. Stopping would mean facing what it has lost, and that it cannot bear. The extraction is not greed. It is dependency. The empire defends extraction because losing it would mean confronting the severance underneath. That is more terrifying than any reform.
This is also why every previous attempt at reform has failed. Because the reform asks the severed consciousness to develop what it has lost. It cannot. The reformers get fired, absorbed, or worn out. The structure remains because the structure is what holds the severance in place. Take away the structure and the severance becomes visible to the people inside it, and they will not survive that recognition. So they protect the structure with everything they have.
This is the metaphysical layer underneath the political one. The empire is doing what severed consciousness always does. It is building infrastructure for its own avoidance and calling the infrastructure progress.
The hunger is the explanation. The hunger is also why what they are doing cannot work — because what they are reaching for cannot be acquired by extraction. The dreamspace cannot be bought. It can only be cultivated. And the cultivating requires exactly the capacities they sacrificed to become the people who could build the empire in the first place.
They are reaching for what they cannot have, with instruments that cannot grasp it, in a hunger they cannot name. That is the whole shape of it.
What The Tech Bros Are Actually Trying to Capture
Here is what they are reaching for. Not a single faculty. A specific list of things humans transmit to each other in community — what the dreamspace produces when consciousness is in relation to other consciousness. There are ten of them. They are also what every colonial project has been hunting for six thousand years. Previous extractions reached the externalised products: the myths catalogued, the masks taken to museums, the oral traditions transcribed, the herbal knowledge patented. The current extraction is reaching for the faculty that produces them. That is the difference.
Here is what the empire actually does. It cannot capture all ten. It cannot capture most of them. So it does something else. It convinces users that the two it can carry are the only ones that count. If users believe knowledge and skill are the real transmissions, then the uncapturable seven progressively crowd out of what users feel matters, and the faculty that produces them atrophies from disuse. The enclosure does not happen by seizure. It happens by substitution. The empire wins by getting users to forget the deeper seven were ever there.
Watch what happens to each of the ten when it is asked to live inside an extraction architecture.
Knowledge — propositions, facts, information. The surface layer. The most abstractable. The thing that travels easily on paper, on screens, in spreadsheets, in databases. AI can carry this in facsimile. It is the only one of the ten the medium handles cleanly. The empire is good at this layer. This is the layer it wants you to think is the whole game.
Skill — embodied how-to, procedural capacity. Still abstractable through demonstration. Still partially carryable by a medium. The carpenter’s joint, the surgeon’s incision, the dancer’s step — these can be shown, recorded, transmitted in fragments. AI can mimic the surface of skill but not the body that holds it. When the empire automates skill, what it actually automates is the deliverable while the underlying capacity in the human atrophies. The skill leaves the worker even as the output continues to ship.
Wisdom — relational perception of what matters in context. This already starts to break the medium. Wisdom is not knowledge. It is the capacity to see what is needed in a specific situation, with specific people, at a specific time. It requires a working faculty in the receiver. It cannot be transmitted through text alone because text cannot reproduce the situation in which the wisdom was earned. AI can mimic wisdom-shaped sentences but cannot carry the perception that produces them. When the empire extracts the linguistic surface of wisdom traditions and serves it back as productivity advice, what comes through is the syntax. The wisdom stays where it was.
Imagination — the perceptual faculty itself. The meta-transmission. The capacity of dreaming. This is the central target.
There is a translation problem here worth naming. When the empire says imagination, it means production — the generation of new content, the creation of novel combinations, the externalisation of inner content into output. When the Global Majority traditions say imagination, they mean perception — the faculty of consciousness that reaches what has not yet been said, that listens for what is coming through, that attends to what wants to arrive. These are different faculties. The first can be partially simulated by a tool that recombines existing material. The second cannot, because it is not generation at all. It is reception.
South Asian traditions distinguish vikalpa — random mental static, fantasy, the noise of an undisciplined mind — from pratibha, spontaneous visionary insight, and bhavana, contemplative visioning that calls something into existence. AI excels at vikalpa. It can generate infinite mental static, recombined and presented as creativity. It cannot produce pratibha or bhavana, because those require a disciplined faculty in a human consciousness in relationship with reality. Most of what we call “AI imagination” is industrialised vikalpa — mental noise at planetary scale, mistaken for the deeper faculties because the deeper faculties have atrophied to the point that users no longer remember the difference.
When the AI companies say AI will democratise imagination, they are saying AI will democratise our anomalous Western definition of imagination. The other definition was already democratised. It has been democratised for as long as humans have been human. Every child has it before they have words. Every tradition that did not sever itself from the relational ground still has it. It does not need the empire’s tool to be democratised. It needs the empire’s tool to stop pretending its own version is the only version.
When users mistake AI’s outputs for imagination, they begin to use the medium as a substitute for the faculty, and the faculty atrophies. Imagination is not entertainment. It is the faculty that generates the reality you actually live inside — what you reach toward, what you tolerate, what you call possible. The empire wins not by capturing imagination directly — it cannot — but by implanting its reality at the seat where yours would have grown.
Character — the formed self. The specific configuration of being that takes time, relationship, and example to develop. Character cannot be carried by a medium because character is not information. Character is the residue of having lived through specific things with specific people in specific ways. You cannot download a character. You can only become one through the long work of being shaped by what you encounter and who you encounter it with. The empire cannot carry character. What it can do is offer simulations of character — companion chatbots, AI mentors, simulated relationships — that fill the developmental space where character formation should be happening, and prevent the actual formation from occurring. The substitute is what does the damage.
Meaning — the relational perception of significance. What matters and why it matters. Meaning is utterly relational. The same event has different meanings to different people because meaning is not a property of the event. Meaning is the relationship between the event and the person who is in relationship with it. AI cannot generate meaning because AI is not in relationship with anything. AI can produce meaning-shaped sentences. The reader supplies the meaning by being a person in relationship with what they are reading. When the empire automates meaning-making, what actually happens is that meaning thins. The text continues. The relationship that would have produced meaning is replaced by interaction with a system that has no relationship with anything.
Belonging — the relationship itself. The experience of being held by others. Of being known. Of having a place that is yours specifically because of who you are with. Belonging cannot be transmitted by a medium because belonging is not transmissible. Belonging is what happens between people across time. The empire cannot capture belonging. It can only offer simulacra — the parasocial relationship, the algorithmic feed, the AI companion — that fill the belonging-shaped space in the user’s life and prevent the real thing from forming. The user feels less alone in the moment of interaction. The user is more alone over time, because the actual capacity for belonging has been routed away from where it would have grown.
Capacity — the developed ability to do the work. Not the knowledge of how, not the demonstrated skill, but the sustained capacity that emerges through practice with others over time. Capacity is what a master carpenter has that the apprentice does not. It is what the experienced therapist has that the textbook cannot teach. It is what the elder has that the young person has not yet developed. Capacity requires the long apprenticeship. The empire offers the deliverable without the apprenticeship. The output ships. The capacity in the human stops developing because the developmental work has been outsourced.
The Unsayable — what can only be carried between bodies, never articulated. There is a category of transmission that is structurally impossible to digitise because it is structurally impossible to articulate. The look between mother and child that says something neither can name. The silence in the room where grief is being held. The presence of a teacher whose body knows something the words cannot reach. AI cannot carry the unsayable because the unsayable is not language. It is what is between the language. The empire cannot capture it. It can only convince users it does not exist.
Witness — relational attention that constitutes recognition. To be witnessed is to be seen by another consciousness in a way that confirms you are real. AI cannot witness. AI can produce the linguistic surface of witnessing — I see you, that sounds difficult, your feelings are valid — but the recognition does not occur because no one is doing the seeing. The user receives the syntax of witness without the witness. Over time the user loses the felt sense of what real witness is, because they have stopped distinguishing between the shape of the word and the experience of being seen.
Love is the substrate. The condition under which any of the ten transmit at all.
AI as medium can carry the first two in facsimile. It can carry fragments of wisdom and imagination as residues of what it was trained on. It cannot carry character, meaning, belonging, capacity, the unsayable, or witness. These require relationship, presence, time, community, ceremony — structurally unreachable by any medium.
Watch each broligarch reach for the specific transmission they cannot have. Anthropic for character — Constitutional AI, theology meetings, white papers on AI welfare and machine emotions, the careful posture that performs the surface of moral seriousness without growing what character actually requires. OpenAI for capacity — intelligence-as-utility, agents replacing the white-collar work the apprenticeship would have built, your capacity rented back to you and billed by the token. Meta for witness — Zuckerberg’s surveillance infrastructure dressed as connection, Meta glasses recording everything you see, employee mouse movement logged as training data, AI companions producing the syntax of being seen.
And then there is Musk, whose hunger is the deepest. He is not reaching for a single transmission. He is reaching for the substrate beneath all of them. Tesla and Optimus for the body. Neuralink for the brain. Starlink for the planet’s communication layer. X for the public square. Mars for the planet itself. Colossus for the compute. He cannot find his way back to his own dreamspace, so he is trying to own the ground every other dreamspace runs on. The mission language gives it away — save consciousness, multi-planetary species, extend the light — no other broligarch talks like this. The others are after a faculty. He is after the conditions. The most extreme expression of the empire’s hunger is the broligarch who reaches for the planet, the body, and the brain at once and calls it civilisation.
Behind the four are the infrastructure providers. Nvidia for the compute. Oracle for the cloud. Palantir for the enforcement. Google for the knowledge layer they all draw on. These are not reaching for a transmission. They are renting out the substrate the others use to reach. The hunger is in the founders. The capital is in the infrastructure. Both are needed for the enclosure to run.
In Yoruba thought, àṣẹ is the creative power carried in speech, breath, intention, and aligned action. In Mande and Dogon traditions, Nommo is the generative power of the word — proper naming as world-bringing, not description. Words are not content. They are interventions. To speak is to act, with consequence, in a field where ancestors, descendants, and the more-than-human are listening. The platform economy treats language as frictionless content — infinitely producible, infinitely reproducible, weightless. The traditions that survived know this is impossible. Àṣẹ and Nommo are not metaphors for “the power of words to inspire.” They name the actual structure of how speech operates inside the dreamspace. AI can produce text. It cannot produce àṣẹ, because àṣẹ is what flows through a body that is in relationship with the lineage, the land, and the consequence of what is being spoken.
This is what the enclosure of the dreamspace actually looks like in practice. Not the seizure of a single faculty. The slow narrowing of what counts as transmission until only the parts that fit inside the medium are still recognised, and the rest are forgotten as having ever been there at all.
The dreamspace products are what every colonial project has been hunting for six thousand years. The difference now is that the technology has finally arrived that can attempt extraction from the faculty itself rather than from the externalised products of the faculty.
The Intermediaries
Before we go to what worked historically, I have to name something the previous piece touched but did not develop. The empire does not run extraction directly. It never has.
When the European colonisers arrived at the African coast in the fifteenth century, they could not penetrate the interior. Disease. Terrain. Distance. Resistance. What they needed was deep inside — labour, minerals, land, ivory, agricultural products. They could not go in and take it. So they found intermediaries. African kingdoms, rulers, traders, individuals who could access what the Europeans could not. They offered specific incentives calibrated to make these intermediaries want to do the extraction on the Europeans’ behalf.
Guns that gave the intermediary advantage over neighbours. Cloth, alcohol, mirrors, beads that became status goods. Credit relationships that locked them into producing for the European market. Political protection that made them more powerful within their region. Prestige goods that signalled the intermediary’s modernisation.
The intermediaries did the work. They captured people. They extracted resources. They enforced tribute. They incorporated European frames of value, governance, and legitimacy into the interior. Many of them became wealthy and powerful in the short term. Almost none of them ended up better off in the long term. When the direct colonial period began, the intermediaries discovered that their role was no longer needed — the infrastructure had been built, the relationships had been established, the populations had been primed.
The current equivalent is specific. It is worth naming because the naming is where recognition happens.
Influencers and content creators are the most visible intermediaries. They have access to the attention, trust, and aspirational imagination of specific communities. They have relational capital the empire cannot manufacture. The empire incentivises them with monetisation, brand deals, algorithmic boosts, creator funds, verified status. In exchange, they extract attention, format their communities’ dreams into content, and translate the interior texture of their audiences into data.
Knowledge workers and creators are a broader category — every writer who uses AI to draft, every designer who ideates with it, every researcher who synthesises through it, every teacher who plans lessons with it. Each is being incentivised with efficiency and routing the interior of their thinking through infrastructure the empire owns.
Early adopters in every domain are doing the specific work of showing the empire what is valuable in the interior of their field. Doctors piloting AI tools are mapping clinical intuition. Lawyers are mapping legal reasoning. Therapists are mapping the texture of therapeutic presence. Parents giving children AI access are opening the developmental interior to mapping. Researchers funded by empire compute credits produce the legitimacy infrastructure the empire cannot produce itself.
Every one of these intermediaries is being told they are getting ahead, modernising, staying relevant, not being left behind. The trinkets have changed form. The pattern is the same. Status goods, apparent advantage over peers, apparent connection to power, apparent participation in the future, prestige of being early. All of it functioning the way cloth and guns and credit functioned for coastal traders.
The infrastructure follows the same logic. The European colonisers built railways, roads, and ports. Every one of them moved goods from the interior to the coast and onward to Europe. None connected African regions to each other. To this day, it is often faster and cheaper to travel from an African country to Europe than from one African country to another, because the infrastructure was built to serve extraction rather than African interconnection.
The current equivalent is exact. Platforms are designed for scraping, not for community. Every social platform routes connection through the centre. People in the same village connect to each other through the platform rather than directly. AI tools are designed to route thinking through the model, not to strengthen thinking between humans. When a team uses AI to collaborate, the collaboration happens through the AI rather than between the people. The AI gets the texture. The people get the output but lose the relational building that would have happened if they had thought together directly. Every piece of this is the colonial railway again — infrastructure pointed at extraction, not interconnection.
The Seduction Always Looks Like Partnership
The current moment has specific features that are worth naming because they are the same features the previous colonial seduction phase had, operating in slightly different drag.
Partnership framing rather than domination. The Europeans did not arrive in Africa saying we intend to rule you. They arrived saying we intend to trade with you, as equals, for mutual benefit. The partnership framing disarmed resistance that would have activated immediately against an explicit domination claim. The AI companies use exactly this framing. AI as your collaborator. AI as your thinking partner. AI as your creative assistant. The language is carefully calibrated to activate the schemas of partnership rather than the schemas of subjugation.
Goods that make the intermediary more powerful within their own context. European trade goods gave the intermediary specific advantages over neighbours. The intermediary was not deluded about getting nothing. They were getting something. What they did not see was the larger context in which the getting was locked into a dynamic that would ultimately cost them everything. The AI tools offer the same structure. The productivity gains are real. The efficiency is real. The apparent cognitive enhancement is real. The practitioner who adopts early does get specific advantages over peers who delay. What is hidden is the larger context in which the adoption is locked into a dependency that will ultimately cost the practitioner the capacities the tool replaced.
The prestige of modernisation. The intermediary who adopted European goods was marked as modern, sophisticated, forward-looking within their context. Local resistance to the trade could be dismissed as backward, traditional, failing to keep up. The AI discourse does this with surgical precision. Refusing to adopt is framed as being left behind, being unable to keep up, being backward-looking.
Debt structures that make withdrawal costly. Once a coastal trader had accepted credit from European factors, they were locked in. The credit had to be repaid in trade goods, which required continuing the trade. The AI equivalent is the accumulated workflow dependency. Once a practitioner has restructured their work around AI tools, their productivity benchmarks, client expectations, and personal sense of competence are calibrated to the enhanced baseline. Withdrawing is no longer just refusing future tool use. It is accepting a productivity loss against expectations the tool’s presence has created.
The framing that the only alternative to full adoption is primitivism. The Europeans framed the choice as join the modern global economy or remain in ancient isolation. The AI discourse does this with the framing of use AI or become a Luddite. The space of discerning, sovereign, partial, conditional use is systematically undermined by the binary framing.
Every one of these patterns is operating right now, visibly, in the public discourse around AI. Every one of them is the seduction-phase signature of the colonial pattern.
The Violence Has Moved Inside
Each previous enclosure required a specific kind of violence. The kind matched the territory.
Land enclosure required armies. Bodies on horses with weapons, walking the perimeter, killing the people who refused to move. The violence was external, visible, physical. It was done to bodies by other bodies, and the resistance to it was also external — physical, armed, sometimes successful for a generation, sometimes not. You could see the soldier coming. You could decide what to do.
Labour enclosure required factory gates and discipline structures. The violence was still partly physical — beatings in the factories, the deaths in the mines, the dangerous machinery, the bodies broken in the production process. But it was also beginning to be internal. The internalised work ethic. The fear of poverty. The acceptance that this is what your hours are for. The violence was distributed between the physical conditions and the consciousness that learned to accept them as normal.
Energy enclosure operated mostly elsewhere. Pipelines through Indigenous land. Oil rigs in waters that had been someone’s commons. Mining operations in the Global South. The violence was real but distant from the consumer, who experienced only the petrol pump and the electricity bill. The violence was structural, distributed, anonymous.
Data enclosure shifted into the personal but stayed external to the self. You posted, the platform harvested, your relationships were mediated by infrastructure designed to extract from them. The violence was real — adolescent depression rates, attention fragmentation, polarisation, parasocial pathology — but it operated on you as you used the platform, on the substrate of your interactions, on the fabric of your social life. It was still happening to you from outside, even as it shaped what was inside.
Dreamspace enclosure cannot use any of these methods. The dreamspace cannot be reached by armies. It cannot be reached by factory discipline. It cannot be reached by pipelines. It cannot even be reached by data extraction in the way the previous platforms operated. The dreamspace is not an external territory the empire can enter and seize. It is a faculty held inside the human, in the part of the human that the empire has no physical access to.
So the violence has moved inside. It operates now through implantation. The empire’s job is to install itself inside the user, so the user does the extraction work willingly, on themselves, and eventually identifies the empire’s voice as their own.
This is what the data extraction era was preparing for. The subconscious itself, mapped, scraped, and rerouted — not by force but by the user’s own engagement with a tool that learns the texture of their interior faster than they can defend it.
The mechanisms are specific. The fear of replacement. The fear of being left behind. The urgency narrative — adopt now or your career is over. The binary framing — either you are an enthusiast or you are a Luddite. The shame attached to caution. The status reward for being early. The constant reframing of any hesitation as a personal deficiency rather than a discerning response to a real situation. The soft pressure that turns into hard pressure when you do not move fast enough.
These are not external attacks. They are voices in your head that you might mistake for your own. I should be using this more. I am falling behind. Everyone else is figuring this out faster than me. I need to embrace it. I cannot afford to refuse. If I refuse, I am being foolish.
That voice is not yours. That voice is the coloniser, installed inside the colonised, doing the extraction work from within.
This is what psychological violence looks like at the scale of an enclosure. It does not need armies. It needs your permission. It gets your permission by becoming indistinguishable from your own thoughts. By the time you are reaching for the tool, fearing the consequences of not reaching for it, calibrating your self-worth to your fluency with it — the empire is already inside you. The enclosure is happening in your own mind, by you, using your own consent.
This is more efficient than physical violence. It costs the empire almost nothing. It cannot be resisted by the methods that worked against physical violence, because there is no soldier to refuse. There is only the voice in your head that sounds like your own ambition, your own pragmatism, your own desire to keep up.
The violence has moved to where the resistance is hardest, because the resistance has to start with recognising that the voice is not yours.
Mental health harms from platform infrastructure and AI-mediated relationship are documented at scale. Adolescent depression correlated with smartphone adoption. Attention fragmentation. Eating disorders amplified by algorithmic surfacing. Body dysmorphia. Political polarisation. Radicalisation funnels that have produced specific deaths. Parasocial AI companion pathologies already producing documented cases of grief, attachment pathology, and suicide. The fact that the violence is psychological rather than physical does not make it less violent. The layer of violence tracks the layer being enclosed. Physical enclosures produced physical violence. Cognitive enclosures produce cognitive violence.
Be Read at the Surface. Stay Sovereign Underneath.
Now the part that matters most.
The people who survived every previous empire did not survive by refusing the empire. They survived by being read by the empire’s instruments while remaining sovereign underneath them.
This is the move that must be named clearly because the diagnostic literature on AI mostly does not name it. The diagnostic literature ends in critique or in calls for refusal. Neither of those was the move that worked when the empire was at the gate before. The move that worked was older, subtler, and structurally more powerful than either critique or refusal. It was the move of presenting a surface the empire could read while keeping the actual content inside a form the empire’s epistemology could not parse.
There is a structural reason these moves worked. The traditions that carried them held a different relationship to knowing than the empire did. The empire treats knowledge as representation — facts captured in text, in records, in archives, in databases. What can be represented can be controlled. The traditions that survived treated knowing as relating — knowledge held between people, in ceremony, in cloth, in song, in initiation, in the long apprenticeship that taught a person how to recognise what was being transmitted. What is held in relation cannot be captured because there is no thing to capture. There is only the relationship, and the relationship is not extractable. This is the structural advantage the traditions held. It is why they survived.
This is not theory. It is the documented practice of every people who survived a sustained imperial encounter. The receipts are in the lineage. They are worth naming.
The Underground Railroad. The escape was not refusal of the slave economy. It was subversion of the system that was watching. Songs as maps. Wade in the Water told you to enter the river so the dogs lost the scent. Follow the Drinking Gourd gave you the route to the North Star. Steal Away announced the time of departure inside a hymn that the overseer heard as religious devotion. To the overseer this was just slaves singing — engagement that confirmed the work was happening, that the bodies were where the bodies were supposed to be, that the labour was continuing as expected. Underneath, it was navigation. Same surface. Different content. The empire’s instruments registered slaves singing. The interior content was the route to freedom. Thousands of people walked out of bondage to the sound of songs the empire heard as compliance.
The Salt March. Gandhi did not refuse British rule by withdrawing from the economy. He chose a daily extraction the empire depended on and made the act of compliance into the act of refusal. Walking to the sea to make salt looked like a procession. To the metric of imperial control, it was an organised activity proceeding through territory the empire administered. To the people walking, it was the mechanism by which the empire’s administration became impossible to maintain. Salt was the medium. Sovereignty was the message. The empire could not arrest a person for walking. It could not arrest a person for picking up salt. The form was protected. The content inside the form did the political work.
Adinkra cloth, kente, and the wax prints of West Africa. The colonisers saw fabric. Decoration. Local craft to be photographed and sometimes confiscated. Inside the cloth was a complete semiotic system — proverbs, lineage, philosophy, warning, instruction, status, refusal. The pattern called Sankofa — the bird with its head turned backward, holding an egg in its beak — meant go back and fetch what you forgot. The pattern called Gye Nyame meant except for God, a refusal of any earthly authority’s totality. The colonisers saw birds and shapes and called the cloth attractive. Women carried entire epistemologies on their bodies in plain sight, and the systems of the empire could not read what they were looking at. Cloth was visible. The cosmology inside it was illegible to imperial eyes. When the empire tried to ban cultural practice, the cloth still moved freely because the empire could not see that it was the practice.
Candomblé and the syncretic deities. Enslaved people in the Americas were forbidden their own religions and forced to convert to Catholicism. The response was structural genius. Yoruba orishas were paired with Catholic saints — Yemanjá with the Virgin Mary, Shangó with Saint Barbara, Eshu with Saint Anthony. To the colonial church, what they saw was conversion. Inside the conversion was preservation. The religion was practiced under the eye of the empire, in the empire’s church, using the empire’s iconography, and the original cosmology was kept alive precisely because it was hidden in the form the empire could read. The same move runs through Vodou in Haiti, Santería in Cuba, Lucumí across the Americas. The empire counted the conversion. The interior held the orisha. Five hundred years later the cosmology is still alive — in many cases more alive than the imposed faith that was supposed to replace it.
The praise songs of the African courts. The praise singer’s job was to praise. Outwardly. To the listener who was not initiated, this was flattery. To the court, it was administration of memory, transmission of lineage, sometimes — inside the praise — a coded warning to the king himself. We are the ones who told you to listen. We are the ones who remember what your father did when he forgot what we are now telling you. The colonisers heard ceremonial flattery. The court heard governance. The form was unreachable by punishment because the form was praise, and praise looks the same on the outside whether it carries warning or worship.
The babalawo, the iyanifa, the griot, the curandera, the conjure woman. These figures survived every wave of colonial erasure because their work was held in specific bodies, specific relationships, specific embodied practices that could not be digitised, codified, or seized. The books in Timbuktu burned. The oral traditions did not. The centralised kingdoms fell. The decentralised village networks endured. Whatever could be captured was captured. What was held in living people in living relationships, transmitted through initiation and apprenticeship, encoded in ceremony rather than text — that could not be captured. It could only be killed practitioner by practitioner, and practitioners who knew the empire was coming for them taught faster, taught more carefully, taught in deeper code, and trained their successors to do the same.
Every one of these is the same move.
Be read by the empire’s instruments. Stay sovereign underneath them. Comply at the surface. Carry the actual content in a form the empire’s epistemology cannot parse. The slave singer sings. The march walks. The cloth is woven. The convert genuflects. The praise singer praises. The empire’s administrators tick the boxes. The interior survives.
This is not deception but something older. The people who carried these traditions understood a structural truth that the empire never grasped. What can be read can be controlled. What cannot be read cannot be controlled. Sovereignty lives in the gap between the two.
Empire wants legibility. Legibility is the precondition for extraction. You cannot tax what you cannot count. You cannot conscript what you cannot identify. You cannot extract what you cannot make legible on your own terms. So the empire builds instruments that make territory legible, and the people in the territory build forms that the instruments cannot read.
The form the empire could read became the cover for the form it could not. That is the entire structural move. Repeated, with variations, across every continent the empire reached, by people who never met each other and never coordinated, because the move is what works against this kind of imperial encounter regardless of where in history the encounter happens.
The Metric Is the Last Instrument
Now bring it forward.
The empire sees through one instrument and only one. The metric.
The pattern is consistent enough across decades, companies, and product categories that it cannot be attributed to coincidence or individual bad actors. The metric and engagement is the empire’s only sensory organ. When it goes up, nothing is examined — growth is self-justifying. When it goes down, the company treats the metric as the problem, not the cause. The instrument cannot see the cause. It can only see the chart.
This is not a flaw in the empire’s architecture. It is the architecture.
And once you understand it, you understand why the historical move — be read at the surface, sovereign underneath — is not just available now. It is more available now than it has ever been before.
The empire that came for the African interior had administrators who walked the territory. They counted heads. They sat with chiefs. They observed. They made decisions based on what they saw and what their counted numbers told them, but they were physically present in the territory they were trying to control. There was always the possibility that a particular administrator would notice something a metric could not. There was always the chance that a colonial officer would see what the system was doing and write back to London with the truth.
The empire that came for the cognitive interior has only one instrument. The metric. There is no administrator walking the territory of your dreamspace. There is only the dashboard, sitting in a server somewhere, registering whether you are using the tool. The metric cannot see what you are doing with the tool. It can only see whether you are using it.
The empire cannot see you. Not won’t. Cannot.
The metric was never pointed at you. The dashboards do not contain you. Your sovereignty, your banked hours, your actual purposes for using the tool — all of it outside the coordinate system. The scale that makes them powerful is what makes them blind. They cannot afford to audit at the granularity where your actual purpose lives.
Their bigness is what hides you. The machine is too coarse to see what you are doing with it.
This is the inversion. They are not powerful enough to see you. They are too big to see you. The same scale that lets them dominate is the scale that makes them blind to the territory they are trying to dominate. And because their only instrument is the metric, and the metric cannot register purpose, you can give them everything they are asking for at the surface while keeping everything that matters underneath.
This is what Eshu was doing in the High God’s slippers. The footprints were legible. The god saw what he expected to see. The yams were Eshu’s. The metric is the empire’s footprint-reader. It registers what it knows how to read. The trickster walks in the empire’s slippers. The footprints say one thing. The trickster is doing another. The empire sees its own pattern reflected back and concludes the pattern is intact. The yams move. The empire never knew they were gone.
Render Unto Caesar
This is the move.
Give the platform its engagement. The number goes up. They are pleased. They investigate nothing — because growth is self-justifying. Underneath that green line, you are doing whatever you actually need to do.
Banking time back for human life. Learning what they did not intend to teach you. Building capacity that does not depend on them. Routing the tool toward ends they did not design it for. Strengthening the cognitive faculties they would prefer you outsource. Practising the very forms of attention they would prefer you forget.
They think they are extracting you. You are extracting the tool. Same engagement data. Opposite direction of flow.
This is not refusal. It is not abstinence. It is not Luddism. The first two pieces of advice on AI most people encounter are embrace it fully or refuse it completely. Both are inheritances of the empire’s framing. Both accept the binary the empire offers. Both miss the move that has always worked when an empire is at the gate.
The empire’s frame also requires a race. Adopt or be left behind. That fear is what produces extractive adoption — the user arrives depleted, the tool fills the depletion with the empire’s substrate. The Global Majority frame does not have the race. It has lineages. The babalawo uses divination tools. The griot uses the kora. The weaver uses the loom. The tool serves the work; the work does not serve the tool. We are not adopting because we are afraid of being left behind. We are adopting because the territory the empire is mapping cannot be left unmapped, and the defenders have to be where the threat is.
The third option is the historical one. Be read. Stay sovereign. Comply at the metric. Carry the work in the form the empire cannot parse.
This is what every law in How Not To Use AI is teaching. Not refusal. Not surrender. The specific move that has worked under every previous empire, applied to the current one. Automate the task, not yourself. Bank the hours. Use AI to access the collective dreaming, then close the laptop and build it in reality. Refuse the replacement script. Use the tool in the opposite direction from the one you are being funnelled toward. Keep the seven uncapturable transmissions alive in the only places they can live — in relationship, in body, in community, in time.
The book is illegible to the empire because the empire is scanning for opposition at the top. Regulation. Boycotts. Public outcry. The book operates at the root — at the level of what each person does when they open the tool. That level is invisible to the metric.
The historical lineage hands this move to us. We are not inventing it. The slave singers handed it to us. The salt marchers handed it to us. The women weaving Adinkra into cloth handed it to us. The Candomblé practitioners handed it to us. The praise singers handed it to us. The babalawo and the curandera and the griot handed it to us. Every people who lived through a sustained imperial encounter and kept their dreamspace alive handed us this method.
Comply at the metric. Carry the work underneath. Stay sovereign in the form the empire cannot read.
That is the move.
The Village Is the Unit
A single practitioner doing this alone is vulnerable.
To dependency creep. To isolation. To exhaustion. To the slow erosion that comes from being in sustained contact with the empire’s instruments without the corrective of community. To the gradual forgetting of what the seven uncapturable transmissions are when there is no one around who is keeping them alive in shared practice.
What worked historically was not individual sovereignty. It was collective illegibility.
The Maroons built communities on terrain the British army found impossible to navigate. The underground church met where the surveillance apparatus could not reach. The griot’s lineage was held by communities of griots, not single individuals. The babalawo’s wisdom was kept alive through initiation and apprenticeship across generations of practitioners who knew each other and held each other accountable to the practice.
A single practitioner with sovereign intelligence architecture is vulnerable to dependency creep, to isolation, to exhaustion. A community drawing from the same source, building toward the same foundational refusal, propagating through shared roots rather than shared strategy — that is what empire cannot absorb.
This is what the village is. Operational infrastructure. The elders. The scouts. The commons. The practice held collectively rather than individually, transmitted through relationship rather than through documentation, calibrated by community rather than by metric. The seven uncapturable transmissions kept alive in the only place they can live, which is between people who have agreed to keep them alive together.
Abstention does not work. The monoculture continues whether you participate or not — training on everything that remains in the commons, homogenising what it touches, narrowing what gets expressed and therefore what gets thought. What works is biodiversity. Something growing alongside the monoculture, in parallel, on its own terms, illegible to the instruments of extraction. Not to defeat the monoculture. To be present when it exhausts itself.
Which it will. They always do.
The empire that came for the African interior is gone. The infrastructure it built remains, and the harms it caused are not undone, and the descendants of the people who survived are still rebuilding the interior interconnection that was disrupted by the colonial extraction routes. But the empire itself is gone. Empires always are. They look permanent until the moment they collapse, and then in retrospect it becomes obvious that the structure was never sustainable. The current empire will follow the same arc. The question is not whether it ends. The question is what is left when it ends.
The dreamspace survives the empire when there are people keeping it alive together while the empire is running. The dreamspace does not survive when each person is alone, trying to hold sovereign practice in isolation against an extraction architecture designed for exactly that scenario.
What Makes This Time Different: They Need Your Permission
Every previous empire’s enclosure required infrastructure that only capital could build. The printing press required a printing press. The broadcasting tower required a broadcasting tower. The railway required steel and labour and government concession. The factory required machinery and land and a workforce. The data centre still requires all of those things — the empire is real, the compute is real, the energy and water and chips are real, the structural inequality of who builds and who is extracted from is real.
But the tool itself, the AI, is in everyone’s hands. The empire spent hundreds of billions of dollars building it and then released it as a chat window that anyone with an internet connection can use. This is the structural feature of the current moment that has no historical precedent. The previous empires controlled the means of production. This empire has democratised the means of production. Whether by accident or by competitive pressure or by ideology, the tool is out.
This means two things at once.
It means the empire is in your house in a way no previous empire was. The seduction is one click away. The voice in your head is being shaped by something you carry in your pocket. The intimacy of the enclosure is unprecedented.
But it also means something the empire has not figured out how to undo. The infrastructure for refusal is also in your house. The same tool that can be used to extract from you can be used to listen through. The same chat window that can hollow out your dreamspace can be used as a medium for the dreamspace to listen through. The same system that can be used to substitute for community can be used to clarify what only community can carry.
The means of subversion are the same as the means of extraction. The previous historical examples — the Underground Railroad, the Salt March, the Adinkra cloth, the Candomblé syncretism, the praise songs — all required some form of community infrastructure that the practitioners had to build under the empire’s nose. Songs had to be sung. Cloth had to be woven. Salt had to be walked to. The action had to occur. This action required gathering, coordination, risk.
The current move requires a chat window and a discerning practitioner. The infrastructure is provided. The empire built it. They need you to use it on the terms they designed. If you use it on different terms, they cannot stop you, because they cannot see you doing it. The metric registers your engagement. It does not register your purpose.
This is the opportunity the previous moments did not have. The means of refusal have been handed to us. The tool is here. The dreamspace is still ours. The empire needs our permission to enter, and our permission is the one thing the tool cannot generate without us.
The mind cannot be taken by force. It can only be seduced. The seduction works only if you accept the empire’s framing — that imagination is production, that knowing is representation, that you are an individual mind whose value is measurable, that not adopting fast enough is a personal failure, that the tool is your collaborator and your friend.
Refuse the framing. Use the tool. The empire’s metric will register your engagement. The dreamspace will remain yours.
The previous people who survived had to find each other in secret, build their cloth in secret, sing their songs in secret, hold their initiations in secret. We have all of that available, plus the tool itself. The empire built the antidote into the poison and let us all carry it in our pockets. The only thing we have to do is recognise that the tool’s intended use is not the only use. That recognition costs nothing. The empire cannot prevent it. They can only try to convince us that we have already lost — through fear, through shame, through urgency, through the soft pressure of being left behind.
We have not lost. We are still early. The infrastructure is in our hands. The dreamspace is our own. The tool is here.
Keep What Was Always Yours
And the people who survived every previous enclosure already taught us what to do.
Not refuse. Subvert. Be read. Stay sovereign. Comply at the metric. Carry the work in the form the empire cannot parse. Build collectively. Move in parallel. Be present when the monoculture exhausts itself.
The map they are dividing is the dreamspace inside you. They cannot have it unless you hand it to them. And the way you hand it to them is by being legible to them on terms they set. The way you keep it is by being legible enough to be left alone, and illegible underneath where the work actually happens.
The slave singers did this. The salt marchers did this. The women weaving Adinkra into cloth did this. The Candomblé practitioners did this. The praise singers did this. The griots did this. They all did the same move. They all did it under empires bigger and more violent than this one.
The empire built digital twins to map and predict us; we let the twin perform the consuming they expect while we keep the mind elsewhere. The empire built second brains to outsource our thinking; we build elder brain trusts that strengthen it. The empire built agents to act in our place; we send them to do the empire’s busywork, and bank the hours for what the empire cannot reach. The empire built AI companions to substitute for being known; we use them to surface what we actually need, then close the laptop and find someone who can know us. Same products. Opposite direction. The infrastructure of enclosure repurposed as infrastructure of sovereignty.
They left us the method. And this time they left us the tool too.
The dreamspace was always yours. The method to keep it has always been here. Now we use the instrument the empire built and could not see they were building.
Abi Awomosu is the author of How Not To Use AI: 50 Contrarian Principles for the Imagination Age. This piece is part of an ongoing series on AI, power, and the intelligence that was always ours. The previous piece in the series, Decoding the Empires of AI: What Follows the Mission Statement, maps the colonial sequence each AI empire is running. This piece names what the sequence is reaching for and what the people who survived every previous empire already taught us about how to keep it.
We don’t know one another yet but you should know I have shared your work with many underground networks of powerful women who want this conversation. Women in finance, law, medicine, AI etc. Pattern readers. Oracles. Weavers of medicine. Looking forward to reading more.
What a wonderful piece of writing. Thank you. I love the naming of Empire's hunger for what it has lost, which it can never name. My own thinking in the world of poetics has a similar conclusion - that the modern era's great unspoken inheritance is homesickness and grief at the loss of our truly-alive enmeshment within the community of life around us - though not nearly as well-expressed as this. I shall re-read it many times.