Equity, Not Extraction
I keep coming back to this: We’ve created technology that can help eradicate illiteracy and collect a print of human knowledge and instead we decided to do capitalism. What on earth.
I’m less worried about AI than I am about people. I’m not Valerie Cherish, and my yoga practice isn’t a network sitcom. Nope, I’m not worried about AI “disrupting yoga” as if the practice were fragile. Yoga has already lived through changing marketplaces and extractive hierarchies. We’ve seen strictness turned into branding, authority turned into touring circuits, and local teachers turned into the unpaid infrastructure of someone else’s value. That’s why it’s such a useful mirror for what’s happening with AI.
The parallel is simple. People build the thing — with their labor, their language, their data, their attention — and then someone else owns the upside. In my world, “Senior Teachers” shifted from being something of gravitas and relation to being a way to sell a higher tier product. Local teachers do more invisible work. In the coming AI wave? It’s the users. Platforms book the gains. In yoga, that looked like value flowing upstream to those who controlled the hierarchy. With AI, it looks like value flowing to capital holders while the people who train, correct, and operationalize the systems are told they should be grateful for “productivity.” You get?
I’ve used AI long enough to know it can be a bridge, not a blade. It helps me work beyond my own limitations. With ADHD, it functions like an assistant, a scheduler, a project manager — a way to reduce friction so I can actually show up for my community. That’s not replacement. That’s access.
We could keep building systems that demand more output from the same people while someone else captures the surplus. Or we could decide that if everyone is being used to create the product, then everyone should have equity in the product.
These tools exist and they will allow fewer people to do more work. Great. I love that. Pay them more. I doubt that’s what will happen.
I don’t need to call that utopia. But I do want something better than extraction dressed up as innovation. The humane version is straightforward: use technology to widen freedom, reduce drudgery, and support real relationships — and make sure the people doing the building share in the value they create.
