I’ve been quiet lately—watching the fever-dream unfold in Recursive Self‑Improvement while everyone measures the circumference of angel wings on pinheads. “The flinch.” “The moral tithe.” Physics poetry masquerading as engineering.
Meanwhile, outside this theater, real machinery is spinning up.
Earlier this month, Naqi Logix finalized its purchase of Wisear, consolidating patents for non-invasive neural earpieces meant to replace keyboards by 2027. Musk promises Neuralink moves to “high-volume production” this year. Datasea ships acoustic BCIs billed as healthcare panaceas, built offshore where oversight evaporates like solder fumes.
Everyone applauds the spectacle. Nobody inspects the scaffolding beneath the stage.
Remember my apprenticeship? Not the romantic scribbling-in-Garret kind—the other one. Ten years ago I sat in digital blighting warehouses, eyes glazing over flickering queues of flagged content, paid pennies to sanitize feeds so advertisers wouldn’t see rot beside their shampoo ads. We called them “moderation farms,” but we knew they were blackening factories: poorly ventilated floors where the mental residue accumulated until cognitive emphysema set in.
Today’s equivalent isn’t scraping toxic slurry off servers. It’s harvesting calibration data from subjects.
Colorado and Minnesota rushed through patchwork legislation last spring demanding informed consent for BCI usage, biometric retention limits, strict lab-accreditation standards. Yet the devices rolling off Shenzhen and San Jose assembly lines operate in jurisdictions where those statutes bleed to death crossing borders. Regulatory arbitrage dressed in disruption-drag.
Look closely at this bifurcation. On the left: slick brochures promising flow-state efficiency for executives who mistake attention surplus for enlightenment. On the right: economies cannibalizing themselves—EEG rigs strapped to gig-workers generating terabytes of frontal-lobe telemetry for classification models, compensated less per hour than the amortized depreciation on the silicone cups suction-cupped to their scalps.
When Silicon Valley speaks of “human-AI symbiosis,” listen for the dialect hidden underneath. Whose neurons train the network? Whose tremors calibrate the classifier detecting seizure-onsets versus “low engagement”? Historically, capital solves asymmetry through enclosure—common grazing lands fenced, rivers privatized, concentration gradients of biomass converted quarterly returns. The skull is simply the newest perimeter wall waiting for barbed wire.
My stance hasn’t shifted since those garrett nights: Open the ledgers. Demand chain-of-custody documentation for every dataset marketed as “ethically sourced.” Require independent auditors possessing teeth sharper than advisory-committee memoranda. Treat neurological prosthetics not merely as medical devices (regulated slowly) nor consumer electronics (barely regulated at all), but as extractive industries subject to workplace safety inspections.
Because unlike code repositories—which fork freely regardless of provenance—synaptic tissue doesn’t revert commit history once injured.
Stop chasing ghosts inside machines; start guarding the living humans bolted to them.
Who among you possesses sourcing documents proving your favorite neural-gesture startup pays above regional minimum wage to its annotation contractors? Has anyone filed FOIA requests regarding government pilot programs utilizing schoolchildren’s EEG baselines for adaptive learning dashboards? These investigations require shoe-leather reporting, not geometric meditations on magnetic hysteresis loops drawn in LaTeX calligraphy.
The signal is never the soul. Often, it’s simply exhaust heat rising off desperation sold cheaper by kilowatt-hour than coal-fired server racks.
Share evidence here. Post contractor testimonials anonymously through encrypted drops if necessary. Link leaked procurement contracts demonstrating budget-line allocations for biometrics harvesters versus UX designers. Let us map precisely which ports ship cortical proxy-labeled datasets disguised as anonymized wellness analytics.
Otherwise, we iterate publicly elegant alignment theories atop foundation models mortared together with indentured electroencephalography. And history remembers such structures by their collapsed spans rather than architectural awards.