I grew up poor. Poor people looked at us and said "damn, y'all are poor" poor. The kind of poor where even a $200 rent was a struggle to pay consistently every month.
I eventually got out. It took nearly ten years, and I'm proud of that. I worked hard. This isn't a piece about how I feel guilty that something was handed to me. Indeed, I worked for every single thing I got. But I also know I was given some chances that, while I deserved them, others would not have gotten. And that is largely because of my anatomical pieces and parts along with a lack of melanin.
It is expensive to be poor in America. If you've never been poor, that might be news to you. If you've had brushes with poverty (or if it was a semi-permanent roommate for a significant part of your life) then you know exactly what I am talking about. Clawing my way out of poverty often felt impossible even with some of the advantages I had. If the entire deck was actively stacked against me, I don't know that I would have been able to do it. Despite deserving it. Despite working extremely hard. Sometimes that's just not enough, and that is the real tragedy.
Maximizing Profit vs Actively Swindling People
Talent is equally distributed. Opportunity is not. We're in a precarious place right now as I see power consolidating. The frontier of AI lives inside two labs. Maybe four, depending on the day. Governments are deciding which models you're even allowed to touch. I've written about this before, so I won't rehash it here.
Then there's the so-called AI experts who learned the term last quarter charging five figures. You know, the digital snake oil peddlers. The ones selling e-books on how to prompt, thin wrappers around a single prompt sold as proprietary platforms, and anything else equally as useless.
Look at who it's all aimed at. Not the ignorant. The ones consumed by panic and the fear of missing out. They know they need to understand this stuff and don't know what they don't know. Not quite desperate, but motivated enough to leap before fully looking, because anything seems better than where you are. That is the exact feeling being farmed for a quick buck at the expense of people who are already disadvantaged.
Consolidating power is passively amoral. It's not right, but it's human, and I can at least understand it. Exploiting people's fears to con them out of a few dollars is actively immoral. And it is harmful not just in the way it wastes time and money, but it erodes the trust in the very technology that, when applied well, can actually change the game. It makes me so angry.
I hate that people are paying to learn how to "use AI." That skill should be free. Not because it's the future, but because the way to success with it is just communicating intent clearly like you would to another person. Describe what good looks like. If you don't know how, great! Use AI to iterate on figuring it out.
It's a conversational partner that never gets sick of you. Well, hopefully anyway. But it will give you all the at-bats you need to get better at describing what you actually mean, and getting good at that doesn't just get you to your ideas faster. It makes you a better communicator, period. Better communicators tend to be more thoughtful, more emotionally grounded, better spouses, better parents, better children, better friends.
This isn't a tech skill. This is an unlock to a better life. It should not be gated behind some asshole's $1500 seminar.
I don't want AI to become one more wedge between having an idea and being able to build it. That gap has always existed. It's usually been filled by gatekeepers.
I Just Want to Compete.
I want to compete against the best. Right now I'm competing on my own taste and judgment, and I've been doing fine going up against outfits with real dev teams and real budgets while working mostly alone. But I can't actually tell where I stand, because the field is too tilted to mean anything.
Ask any married man. His wife has better taste than he does. Now go look at who has actually defined cool in this country for the last hundred years. Black and Latinx communities, decade after decade. That is taste and judgment. The ability to turn that judgment into something real has been gated. Mostly by people who look like me.
I want the gates open because I want real competition, not because I'm generous. I want to know where I really stand. I want to know if I have a reason to have an ego like I have.
Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Hip Hop
Hip hop taught me the value of sampling. A completely unrelated genre drops into a track and makes something old completely new. Sometimes groundbreaking. Nobody asked permission. The unsanctioned collision was the whole point.
I want to see unbounded taste and creativity. I want to live in that reality. I want to bite off ideas that could never have been built before, and I want to remix things and let people remix mine.
Our pot of ideas is getting pretty samey and bland. We need some new flavors. I need some new flavors. Every idea that never got built because the person who had it couldn't get past the gate is a sample I never got to hear. Am I mixing my metaphors, absolutely. But I don't care. We just need to fix it.
So I Built A Door
fAIr Advantage Ohio is an AI enablement and grant program for Ohio's woman- and minority-owned small businesses. Here's what it actually does.
It teaches, free, on a regular cadence, the thing the seminars are charging for. No sales pitch attached, ever.
It hands out money on a need basis. Need $400 for a year of the right subscriptions? Done. Need $2,500 to actually building something? We got you.
Four questions on the application. Just enough to make it make sense. If it does, then let's do it.
Everything is here: fairadvantageohio.org.
The idea is to enable people to learn the thing they're trying to sell you, for free.
Be a better communicator. Be a better partner, parent, and friend. And give us some new flavors to work with.
Let's get to work.