This talk discusses suicidal depression, dissociation, substance use, violence, misogyny, shame, and harm to other people. It does not describe methods.
The confession
[Walk out. Stop. Let the room settle.]
I have never apologized.
I have said sorry. A lot.
I have explained myself until the explanation filled the whole room. I have hated myself so loudly that somebody else had to stop being angry and start taking care of me. I have disappeared. I have blamed trauma, money, mental illness, timing, authority, capitalism, the people around me, and the general cosmic inconvenience of being alive.
Some of those explanations were true.
A true explanation can still be used like a fake passport.
At sixteen I was suicidal and depressed. I dissociated and acted out, and I swallowed nearly everything I felt until it came back out sideways. I have almost died from drugs, fights, self-criticism, and plain reckless bullshit. I have hurt people physically, mentally, and spiritually.
I cheated on tests. I made video game cheats. I lied my way around consequences. I learned where the loose board in the fence was, and I called that intelligence.
[Pause.]
I got very good at finding the gap.
In a game I would find the memory address, the spot where the game keeps your health or your score. With a rule, I went for the part nobody enforced. In a relationship, once shame got close enough, I would start looking for the exit before the other person could finish telling me what I had done.
Then I would lock myself in my room and drink and program. I would make graphics tools, modify games, and chase some strange technical question until four in the morning. In there I could build another little world where I wrote the laws and, conveniently, passed every test.
The kid in that room wanted to become what I called the Mad-Happy Scientist.
That was the dream: graphics, code, mathematics, biology, physics. I wanted to make instruments and ask stupid questions until something answered back, until I found the thing under the thing.
As a child I did not want prestige. By the time I was a teenager I chased it anyway.
Prestige was not the dream. Acceptance was.
I was low enough that recognition from almost anybody felt like proof I existed. Other people were down there too. I found real friendship, music, humor, and survival knowledge. I also found bad instruction, and damage dressed up as confidence.
I learned from Mac Dre, Andre Nickatina, RJmrLA, Kodak Black, the Allman Brothers Band, Radiohead, R.E.M., and others, because they let contradiction stay audible. They came from different worlds. I was listening for swagger beside grief, beauty beside alienation, and humor beside despair.
I thought about Jacob's Ladder a lot. Dali. Beksinski. Bodies that looked like shells after the person had gone missing. Landscapes that felt like the inside of grief.
Platoon. Bessel van der Kolk. Robert Sapolsky. Bill Nye. Sesame Street. Even the inhalants and experimental synthetic drugs I took as a kid.
That is not a respectable syllabus. It is the one I had. I was looking for anything that would keep pulling the thread in the direction my spirit had called since I was born.
Some peers and elders handed me a counterfeit version of being a man. Women were objects. Exploit people before they exploit you. Bully downward. Pretend not to care. Call it men being men.
I repeated enough of it to own the damage.
Culture explains part of it. Culture did not borrow my hands without permission.
The world preached one thing and rewarded its inversion. It asked for honesty right up until honesty cost status. Respect lasted until cruelty won the room. Hard work mattered unless the shortcut belonged to somebody important.
I felt wrong trying to do good and wrong doing harm. So I swung between them and called the motion survival.
Maybe bipolar is the right word for some of that. Maybe it is not. I am not diagnosing myself here. I know the motion.
That environment taught selfishness and deviance as survival. I kept practicing them after the danger moved.
Under the actions and the performance of hardness, I still believe the same beautifully lit spirit exists somewhere in each of us. That belief leaves the harm where it is. It is why I think repair is worth building for.
I took another road. Then I spent years treating that turn as a permanent sentence. Every unfinished tool became proof that I had not abandoned the dream. Every burst of energy became the start of the life I was supposed to have. When the burst collapsed, I used the wreckage to prove I had failed again.
My family and the people I love paid for that. Money. Sleep. Worry. Neglect. Unfinished promises. And the constant question of whether this week's light would become something real, or one more fire I expected them to stand beside.
So I am trying to apologize.
First to that kid.
I am sorry I abandoned you and then used your name as cover. I am sorry I turned curiosity into a weapon I could use against myself.
I am sorry to the people I love for making them carry a war I would not name.
The apology they are owed cannot happen in this talk. It has to happen without an audience and without control over the answer. It cannot assume I get forgiven because I finally found the nerve to speak.
A confession can be another shortcut.
Shortcuts are my field.
I cannot tell whether I am ethically or morally pure. I know purity is a terrible entry requirement for repair. The least I can do is take the skills I built while looking for locks and aim them at opening a door, away from finding another person to exploit.
Black boxes
[Shift. More conversational.]
Everybody keeps talking about black-box AI, meaning AI whose inner workings nobody can read, as though opacity showed up with neural networks, the technology behind today's AI.
Come on.
People are black boxes with excellent public relations. We make a decision, feel the decision, and then hire language to defend it. We call appetite principle, fear discernment, status merit, property ethics, and avoidance self-care.
I did the same thing at home.
When I lied, I edited somebody else's picture of reality without permission. Then I benefited from what they did inside the picture I gave them. When I cheated, I changed the evidence other people used to decide who had done the work, who understood it, and who deserved trust.
I controlled the input, then acted offended when anybody questioned the output.
That is a tiny autocracy. I hated authority and wore a little crown in private.
This is why I do not trust anti-authoritarianism by itself. "No" can save a life. It can protect a worker, an artist, a child, a citizen. I also know another kind of no. It shows up when somebody else has a boundary and I cannot stand the feeling of not being sovereign.
I still lie. I still avoid. I can still turn a real wound into a license to wound somebody else. Saying so does not make me honest. It is a risk disclosure.
There is a temptation to say, "I am a liar and a cheat," and let the identity close the case. Shame loves that sentence because it sounds final. If I am rotten all the way through, nothing specific has to be repaired.
The useful sentence gives me a job:
I have lied. I have cheated. I can do both again. I need structures around the part of me that starts hunting for a shortcut when the cost can be pushed onto somebody else.
That is where a lot of my technical work came from.
Receipts, which are records of what happened. Replay, so anyone can run the thing again and see whether the result holds. Provenance, the trail each piece left on its way in. A program doing the work that cannot edit its own checker, so it cannot grade its own homework. A system allowed to say UNVERIFIABLE when it could not check the claim, and stop there.
My tools are existential dread in programmatic form. I got sick of how full of shit I could be, and I tried to build the other way.
Then it kind of became a thing.
The robe
[Pause.]
Khalil Gibran gave me the image that holds the political part of this together.
In The Broken Wings, Gibran's 1912 novel, a bishop arranges a young woman's marriage to his nephew because her father is rich. That woman, Selma Karamy, does not lose for lack of a better argument. There is no fair argument to win. The bishop controls the standard, benefits from the decision, and sits above appeal. His robe turns power into propriety.
The robe changes shape easily.
A university can define merit, sell access to the definition, and then point to the credential as proof the definition worked. A platform can eat culture, own the route to the audience, generate substitutes for the people whose work fed it, set the price of visibility, and call itself neutral.
Creative communities can wear the robe too. A human-only practice can matter. Consent matters. Labor matters. Process can be part of the work. Pedigree can still hide inside ethics, where familiarity passes for authenticity, difficulty for virtue, and membership for merit.
I wore the robe whenever my intention outranked somebody else's experience. I wrote the rule, took the verdict, and made appeal expensive.
Hating the robe does not stop me from putting it on.
That goes for founders, rebels, artists, scientists, AI critics, anti-capitalists, and anybody else who has correctly identified a cage and therefore starts to believe they could never build the next one.
Fuck a black box. Also, fuck a glass prison.
I do not want every person forced to publish their trauma, medical history, private messages, or inner life. People need protected interiors. Power and public claims need an open surface. If a system acts, show what authority it had and what happened afterward. A scientific claim needs its source and its check. And when a work is sold on a claim about its process, tell the truth about what went into it.
The person can keep an interior. The work does not get to certify itself.
What AI split open
[Build energy.]
AI has thrown this problem into nearly every field at once.
For a long time, hard work and the worker's route traveled together. A solved problem implied study, and a polished illustration implied practice. Working code meant somebody had touched the machine underneath it.
Then the bundle split open.
A person can now produce expert-shaped work without traveling the expected road. That can be liberating as hell. Pedigree shut people out for reasons that had very little to do with what they could contribute: money, disability, geography, family obligation, language, neurotype, timing, and the thousand accidents that decide who gets a clean runway.
I feel that opening personally. I missed the official road into research. These tools gave me a route back toward the questions.
The opening did not arrive clean.
Generation got faster. Verification did not. The cost of checking moved onto maintainers, teachers, editors, researchers, clients, and audiences. I call that review debt. Somebody pays it even when the invoice is hidden.
Creative workers pay another version. Their craft paid rent. It gave them identity and community. When a client can ask for ten plausible images in an afternoon, the illustrator's lesson about technological change arrives as a lower rate, or no call at all.
I have no patience for people who answer that pain with "Adapt." That is capitalist sadism in a futurist T-shirt.
The AI companies are full of shit when they swallow enormous portions of human culture, turn it into private capability, meter access to the result, and call the rental democratization.
The evangelists are full of shit when they say "just a tool," as though tools had no owner, labor effect, energy cost, training history, or politics.
The purists can be full of shit too. They are right about extraction and collapsing rates. Some of them still turn suffering into a credential, where hours pass for moral worth, scarcity for authenticity, and every hybrid practice for fraud. Meanwhile the software, assistants, stock libraries, samplers, fabrication, and invisible labor under supposedly pure production drop out of the story.
Human-made does not guarantee humane.
And yes, I am using AI to help write this talk.
No reveal. No gotcha.
I gave it my essays, comments, research notes, personal history, and a lot of angry feedback whenever it produced prose that sounded like a tasteful museum plaque about my life. It helped me search, sort, challenge, and edit. I chose what stayed. I am the one standing here.
I will not call this human-written because that label would be convenient. It is AI-assisted, and it is mine because I can explain why the claims are here, I accept responsibility for the result, and you can contradict me.
The machine cannot apologize for me or owe my family anything. If I use confession to manipulate this room, the consequence lands on me.
That part is mine.
A graph and a poem
[Shift to discovery. Curious, less angry.]
Today, Dmitry Rybin published an explicit graph, meaning a specific network of points and links, that he says kills a cost conjecture in single-source unsplittable flow. The conjecture is associated with Dinitz, Garg, and Goemans. The problem had been open for roughly thirty years.
A conjecture is a claim that has been proposed and not yet proved. In plain terms, this one said that when every delivery through a network has to stay on a single path, a set amount of extra room on each link is enough to keep the cost down to what split deliveries would cost.
The proposed graph has a fractional flow of cost 58, which is the cost when deliveries may be split. Keep each delivery whole, allow the stated additive capacity violation of 15 on each link, and every such unsplittable flow still costs at least 60. If that holds, the extra room is not enough, and the conjecture fails. Rybin says he found the graph after pushing GPT-5.6 Pro, an AI model, through about five hours of search.
The graph still deserves independent reconstruction. Good. That is the point.
A universal conjecture says no counterexample exists. One graph can end it. The graph does not care whether it came from a famous lab, a graduate seminar, a private notebook, or a long session with a model. It survives the check or it does not.
This is where AI makes sense to me. Let it search a stupidly large space. Let it keep going after a person gets tired. Then make the object touch something that can say no.
The model's confidence means nothing. Rebuild the flow. Check the costs. Prove the bound. Publish the object and let people attack it.
The search boundary moved. The proof boundary did not.
Mathematics has a luxury art does not. A graph can kill a conjecture. A poem has no kernel, no checker that can rule on it.
A painting cannot compile into beauty. A song cannot fail because its grief went outside tolerance.
Good.
So the question for art is different. Can we build generative work without depending on a hidden inherited model, trained across an undeclared cultural archive?
I think we can.
Start below the prompt. Build the instrument.
The artist chooses the primitives: points, curves, glyphs, meshes, particles, colors, marks, materials, sounds. Then the laws: grammars, collision rules, growth, cellular systems, fluid approximations, shaders, custom physics. In plain terms, the artist picks the basic shapes and the rules that move them.
Variation can come from a hand gesture, a drawing, a microphone, local weather, movement, a plant, a machine, electrical noise in the room, or material a collaborator chose to contribute.
Search can be evolutionary, procedural, or learned inside the world the artist built. A small neural system can start from random weights, the adjustable numbers inside a model, and learn from self-authored material, licensed work, public-domain sources, or synthetic simulation.
The artist builds the possibility space, enters it, and finds out what they made possible by accident. Nobody asks a hidden archive to imitate a finished surface.
The generator becomes part of the artwork.
When I think about Jacob's Ladder, Platoon, Dali, or Beksinski, a copy of the surface would miss what reached me underneath it: dissonance, sacrifice, impossible space, the body as an empty shell, some thread still pulling toward wonder.
Then turn those relations into forces, light, geometry, timing, and material. Not "in the style of." A new instrument built around the pressure beneath the style.
We can record the process too. What entered? What stayed out? Which parts learned? Where did the person intervene? What computing power was used? Which failed paths led to the final thing?
That record does not prove beauty or originality. It tells the truth about lineage, because nothing comes from nowhere. Novelty is a relation that did not exist before, made through an ancestry we are willing to name.
[Build toward conclusion.]
The old world gatekept knowledge through pedigree. The new one is learning to gatekeep it through an invoice.
Metered tokens, where you pay for every chunk of text the model reads or writes. Closed weights, meaning models you cannot download or inspect. Shifting plans. Cloud-only workflows. The surface stays open as long as you keep paying the landlord of the surface.
Fuck that little pipe.
I am anti-capitalist enough to say fuck capitalism, technofeudalism, and autocracy. By technofeudalism I mean tech platforms that collect rent like landlords. I am old enough to know a slogan is not architecture. I can say "stab it in the heart" all day and still wake up inside the same billing portal.
So the work gets boring and concrete.
Optional: the steward platform
[Open the possibility. Less anger, more invitation.]
There is another thing I want to build, because criticism alone does not feed anybody.
Artists already work through references, moodboards, collages, shared folders, and chains of influence. What if the creative workspace kept a living source graph, a map that links each new work to the references it drew on, for the things a person brought into the room?
I mean a record. This photograph. That poster. This palette. That composition. The earlier artist's name, link, license, and preferred credit stay attached after their work enters somebody else's process. Nobody has to play plagiarism cop, and no machine has to calculate who owns twelve percent of a brushstroke.
If the final work earns money, the people in that declared chain could receive a share, when the relationship is clear and everybody agreed to it.
The analogy in my head is a modlist, the list players use to combine many people's add-ons into one game. It builds a world without pretending it authored every mod inside it. Coordination is real work, and coordination does not require erasure.
The platform also needs a place where people can settle differences without turning one another into enemies on sight. Show the process. Correct the record. Offer credit. Remove the source. Negotiate a license. Disagree. Maybe collaborate later.
I want a steward. Enough thieves already stand between the artist and the audience.
The platform should not own the work, the identity, the social graph, or the relationship. The social graph is the network of people you know there. If it charges, the fee should be visible and tied to something it did. People should be able to leave with their records and their community intact.
The same goes for every service platform I care about.
Part of how we judge its success should be how much time it gives back.
Say the system saves the user ten hours. Fine. Who gets those ten hours?
If the person gets two and the company turns eight into margin, the company extracted a productivity gain and put liberation on the invoice.
I want a time dividend. The person keeps the hour for rest, family, study, art, or doing nothing at all. The platform does not get to call life "unused capacity" and sell it again.
Maybe we can all eat if we stop hoarding the food.
Optional: a creative economy beside the old one
[Widen the frame.]
And I do not think we have to wait for the current system to grow a conscience.
A creative economy can be built beside it.
Not another marketplace with softer branding. Community-owned infrastructure, where the chain exists to hold the structure up and leave the nutrients inside it.
The source graph preserves lineage, and the licensing layer preserves consent. Rendering tools, the software that turns a design into a finished image or sound, help make the work. The epistemic engine is the part that tracks what we know and how we know it, and it keeps contribution, uncertainty, and dispute visible. The treasury routes value back through the artists, maintainers, moderators, teachers, compute providers, and the people doing the care work that keeps a community alive.
Each layer feeds the next without becoming its landlord.
That is infrastructure accountable from the bottom up. The people affected by a rule can inspect it, argue with it, change it, leave it, and carry their work somewhere else.
It will not be pure. We are still human. We will compete, hoard, form cliques, protect our friends, punish our enemies, and call whatever benefits us ethical.
Good. Design for the person who exists.
Keep the receipt. Who supplied the source? Who agreed? Who worked? Who maintained the tool? Who received the money? What remains disputed? Who changed the rule, and who benefited?
The goal is a surface we can reopen when power and memory begin editing the story. It gives nobody a universal score for human worth.
This could create domains that barely have names yet: source-bounded generative art, made only from sources the artist has declared, cooperative rendering, community-owned creative models, open research studios, shared fabrication, local learning networks, and service platforms that give people their time back.
Maybe the old system gets dismantled by building enough exits that its worst assumptions stop being necessary for survival.
And if we believe any of the ethics we keep performing in public, then we have to start by being honest about who we are.
All of us.
Capable of building the table. Capable of hoarding everything on it.
Build for that person, and give the community a way to see when the steward starts becoming a thief.
Optional: failing in the open
[Bring the engine back. Firm. Less abstraction.]
All of this is why I want an accountable engine, a system for checking claims that keeps its own record.
I keep wanting to call it a perfect platform for honest infrastructure.
Perfect is robe language.
What I need is a system that can fail where other people can see the failure, keep the record intact, and let somebody affected reopen the case.
I say receipts over encryption. Encryption protects a secret. We still need privacy. Opening the box cannot mean turning a person into glass.
Encryption does not tell us whether an authorized person lied, whether a rule moved after the fact, or whether a gate protects the public or the gatekeeper. A receipt preserves what happened, and verification checks the claim. Appeal gives the person living under the decision somewhere to stand.
The door can be open while the action stays bounded.
A bank cannot let everybody rewrite a ledger. An archive cannot let every visitor replace the record. Fine. Bound the action.
But why can't everybody enter the process? Inspect the rule. Submit a claim. Run a public check. Challenge a refusal. Contribute a bounded fix. See the evidence that decided the case.
Open access is not root access. Root access is the master key that can change anything.
Propriety, credentials, forms, and queues were often stand-ins for verification. Then they became a class system with stationery.
And yes, we will fuck this up.
I am not building for purified people. I know what I can do when truth becomes expensive. The system has to assume that builders, stewards, users, and critics will sometimes lie, hoard, protect friends, punish enemies, and edit the story.
So let the mistake leave a mark.
The record should show the claim, the action, the person affected, what happened afterward, what is disputed, what repair was attempted, which rule changed, and who benefited.
If we are fucked up, let us fuck up in the open.
Do it without spectacle and without asking for absolution. Leave a record that cannot quietly disappear.
I think most of us know some version of the red button. It can point inward, at the person we do not want to answer to, or at the evidence.
I have known more than one of those buttons.
We can crumble, or breathe and maintain. We can also go outside and hurt somebody else, because facing the truth feels worse in the moment.
No system chooses for us. Agency is still ours.
We can walk the path that calls us without turning somebody else into the road.
A system can still stop arranging every incentive around denial. A community can make repair cheaper than lying and cooperation easier than hoarding. It can turn criticism into something we learn from, and stop treating it as a death sentence or a marketing asset.
We have been eating our own lack of accountability and feeding it to the next generation.
Hope is not enough.
Break the wall where it blocks entry, and build a boundary where an action can hurt someone. The receipt goes wherever the story can be rewritten, and the foundation has to be wide enough for everybody to stand on.
We do not exist to stand on anyone else.
Nobody should have to become the floor.
I am a living, breathing reaction
I am not a clean origin point. Nobody is.
I am a reaction to my family, my peers, the women I loved and hurt, the men I copied, the rooms I survived, the institutions I distrusted, the music that taught me how to posture, the art that taught me how to ache, the drugs I used to leave myself, and the code that let me build another world.
Environment enters. I transform it. Consequence leaves.
That is no acquittal. A reaction still has products. People still breathe what comes out of the chamber.
It is also why I think AI can become what sampling became for music.
Sampling means building new music out of pieces of old records. Some people heard it as proof that musicians had run out of ideas. It proved culture was already recursive. A drum break could cross a decade, a machine, a neighborhood, and a different grief, then become something that did not exist before.
The ugliest part was the ownership system around the masters: the labels, the clearance, the distribution choke points, and middlemen making themselves indispensable by standing between artists and one another.
AI is rebuilding the record label around the sampler.
I want the model to become an instrument, with a source graph that keeps lineage visible. I want artists to name what entered, what was licensed, what was refused, what was transformed, and who should receive credit or an agreed share. I want the community to own the tool and the relationship after the introduction.
Fuck the label. Keep the lineage.
And every domain has record labels. Journals. Credentials. Banks. Clouds. Bureaucracies. Coordination turns into ownership, and then ownership calls itself order.
I know the language I inherited for defiance. The music taught me lines like "ima fuck yo bitch." I understand the voltage. It says: I can enter your world, take what you call yours, and make your authority look weak.
But a woman is not proof that I defeated another man.
If I am trying to dismantle ownership, I cannot keep turning a woman into property every time I want to sound powerful.
So I want to keep the defiance and kill the possession.
Fuck the monopoly and spare the woman. Fuck the gate and spare the person trapped beside it. Fuck the label, the landlord, the lie, and the little pipe they expect everybody else to drink from.
"Come get me" means: inspect the work. Contradict me. Rebuild it. Fork it, meaning copy it and take it somewhere I did not. Show me the receipt. I do not need to threaten a body to stand behind an idea.
My principle is fertile. Let it impregnate the culture and never possess a person. Fork it and mutate it until it gives birth to something better than me.
I may still use the old language. Knowing better has never guaranteed that I behave better.
But I want to learn to call women women.
I want to see myself as a man.
A man, as I mean it, does not dominate. He provides without possessing and protects without controlling. His strength can hear no. He stays present after the explanation stops working.
I want to provide something good.
That does not make me good.
Sincerity is not a receipt.
The work has to survive contact with another person's reality and stay useful without requiring faith in me. When I become the obstacle, it needs an exit other people can use.
I am a living, breathing reaction. I carry what came before me, and the reaction is still happening.
What boring and concrete looks like
Earlier I said the work gets boring and concrete. Here is what that looks like.
Local-first tools, which run on your own machine. Smaller models made more capable through good scaffolding and verification, meaning the tools and checks built around a model. Portable histories you can take with you when you leave a service. Open protocols anyone can build on. Community-owned computing power. Cooperative licensing. Labor agreements that return productivity gains to workers. The right to run offline. The right to inspect, repair, fork, and leave.
Receipts over badges.
A badge says, "Trust me, I belong here." A receipt gives you something you can walk through and check.
The earth belongs inside the receipt too. The cloud is somebody else's building, sitting on somebody's grid, drawing from somebody's watershed. If the creative future depends on invisible sacrifice zones, the cage has only moved.
The Mad-Happy Scientist
[Slow down.]
I keep returning to the Mad-Happy Scientist because I think a lot of people have one.
Maybe yours was an artist, an astronaut, a mechanic, a naturalist, a teacher, a writer, a musician, a healer, or the kid who took apart every broken object in the house to see whether failure had a shape.
Then life happened. Some people jumped through the hoops, some tripped, and some were pushed out. Others turned left, or found a job that paid the rent and slowly separated them from the part of themselves that asked questions for no reason besides wonder.
I treated the missed road into formal research as a verdict. I let pedigree become metaphysics.
Then I resented the institution for a cage I was helping maintain.
That resentment fed grandiosity. Every project had to prove everything, and every good week had to become an empire. I kept trying to swallow the sun and acting surprised when it burned.
Grandiosity tells me I deserve the keys to the city. Shame tells me I am too corrupt to enter. They are close relatives, and either way the whole world stays organized around me.
Ordinary accountable work is smaller.
It looks like one test that can fail, a claim another person can inspect, an artist naming the lineage, an apology made without controlling the response, a boundary accepted even though it hurts, and a door left open behind you.
I still want to pick the lock. I probably always will.
The change is that I do not want to pick it only for myself.
I want to open the cage for everybody, throw away the key, and let the walls rot into soil.
That should make you suspicious. People promising universal liberation have worn a lot of robes.
So contradict me. Inspect the system, reject the doctrine, fork the tool, leave the platform, and tell me where the argument breaks. Nothing I build gets authority from the fact that I hate authority.
I used to want a killing blow against my ego. Even that can be theater. There is no terminal command for the self. Self-destruction removes the person who owes the work.
The apology has to be less cinematic. Tell the truth before exposure forces it. Correct the record, and pay the cost you moved. Accept another person's boundary, and listen without editing their account. Do not demand forgiveness as the prize for finally admitting what happened.
Then keep going, because repair needs somebody alive to do it.
The final rise
[Final rise. Do not rush.]
AI is here. Hypocrisy is here too.
Let go of the old ethics that ask people to die proving they were pure. Keep the ethics that protect agency, consent, livelihood, relation, accountability, and the earth.
Aim the machinery at discovery, local capability, workers sharing the gain, art with an honest lineage, science that keeps the receipt, communities that can refuse, and tools we can inspect, repair, fork, and leave.
I do not know how to solve the human condition. I do not know shit. I am trying to stop turning that uncertainty into paralysis one day and authority the next.
I know the cage was built, and built things can be taken apart.
A black box can be opened without turning a person into glass.
A theorem can meet a kernel and a poem can stay free.
A confession is not a receipt. It can still be the first honest entry in a record that has been lying for a long time.
The Mad-Happy Scientist is still in there. Pissed off, tired, and waiting for me to stop asking whether I deserve to begin.
So get out of the mud. Do not pretend it is imaginary. Do not climb onto somebody else's back.
Get out, turn around, and put something down that gives the next person traction.
Pick the lock for everyone.
Let the walls rot.
Make room for something we could not imagine yesterday.
The coda
[Drop the rise. Speak plainly.]
I need to end with something less heroic.
I believe this hard enough that I am afraid of failing it.
I do not trust myself to live by every word I just said for the rest of my life. I know my patterns. I know what illness, shame, appetite, exhaustion, and fear can do. I still doubt myself. I am not going to clean that doubt out of the ending.
Mental health matters for everybody. Find a way back to yourself that works for you. Faith. Meditation. Therapy. Medication. Curiosity. Reflection. Art. Community. Maybe several of them. Let somebody help hold the door open when you cannot.
I should be honest about my own route. I do not do well with one-on-one therapy. I still prefer self-medication more often than I should. That is not advice. It is part of the record.
Refusing an institution can be self-knowledge, or avoidance wearing self-determination as a costume. A path your spirit did not choose can become another cage, and a self-chosen path can still walk you straight into a wall.
Help is not surrender. Autonomy is not immunity. I have to ask whether the route makes me more present, less destructive, and more able to answer for what I do.
I have said before that I like to sit in my pain. The honest answer is that I do a bit of both.
Sometimes I sit beside it. Sometimes I sit inside it and call the punishment reflection. I have made a home there before. I know the furniture.
I own that.
I am also beginning to learn how to love myself again.
I believe everybody deserves redemption. Redemption is different from erasure, and it is different from automatic forgiveness.
Sometimes the bridge over the canyon fails and you go tumbling down. You do not wake up back on the road. You still have to get up and make the slow march out of the canyon.
Maybe you crawl for part of it. Maybe somebody walks beside you.
But you move.
Otherwise you are just a memory of yesterday.
[Stay plain. This is not a savior speech.]
I want to swallow the darkness and release light in the form of spiritual and mental sincerity.
I think about The Green Mile. The fantasy of taking pain out of somebody, holding it long enough to change its direction, and leaving something gentler behind.
I understand why that image stays with me. I spent a lot of my life taking pain in, mixing it with my own, and throwing it back into the room in a worse shape.
I do not want martyrdom to become another escape. Nobody should have to absorb the whole world's pain until they disappear. The gift has to be a thought, a tool, a structure, a place where the next person does not have to carry the same weight alone.
So, to the young people, the young men and women, and anybody else listening: do not take me as an example of how to behave.
I repeated the same mistakes as the people before me. I made the same excuses and found better language for making them. I took what I received from my father, my mother, my stepfather, my brother, my peers, my exes, and every room that taught me how to survive. I internalized it, distorted it, and sometimes handed it to somebody else.
My behavior reflects that environment. It is not the whole of my intention. It is still my behavior.
Environment is the medium, not an acquittal. It shapes a person, an animal, an idea, a song, a wound, a criticism. That is also why transformation is possible: change the conditions, keep the record, make another choice, and something else can grow.
Until somebody dies, another move remains. Even after a life ends, the impact keeps moving. Harm can stay harm and still teach somebody where the cliff is.
I believe in everybody. Even people who cannot believe in themselves.
I believe in you.
I am trying to believe in me.
I am not announcing an exit. I am here. I stand behind the idea. I am putting it down because anything I want to survive a mood has to leave my head.
Record it and archive it, and let people argue with it. Then turn it toward something material: healing, learning, art, discovery, food, rent, time, people getting paid enough to care for the people they love.
Everybody is only a few decisions, a few losses, or one missing hand away from the person beside them they judge.
Desperation is not a character test.
The middleman can be a regular man too. He can sit at the table as a steward without owning it. We can make the thing, share the gain, and leave enough behind for somebody else to begin.
I have said before that a sincere intention to do good cannot be tarnished. I know what I mean. I also have to apply the same rule here that I apply everywhere else.
Sincerity is not a receipt.
A good intention can be contradicted by behavior. It can become another robe. The gift begins when sincerity survives contact with somebody else's reality and becomes something they can use without having to trust me.
That is what I want to leave behind.
I cannot promise perfect behavior. That would be another lie wearing a promise.
I can promise that I stand by the conviction. I can build a thought and a structure today that I will not tear down tomorrow to protect my ego, and leave something other people can inspect, criticize, use, and carry farther than I can.
I want to build it for the people who endure, the people we lost, and anyone unsure whether they can endure what comes next.
Something closer to a handrail than a monument.
A place to put some weight down.
I may fail this conviction or contradict it, and one of you may have to remind me what I said.
The structure should survive that.
It should survive me.
[Pause.]
I just wanted to leave that here.
Sit with it.
[Stop. Let the silence hold before leaving.]
Delivery notes
The opening should sound exposed. Keep it plain and untheatrical. Do not rush the first pause, and do not ask the audience to reassure you.
The music and masculinity passage is neither a defense nor a playlist interlude. The turn lands on "Culture did not borrow my hands without permission." Leave the uncertainty around bipolarity intact. Do not diagnose yourself onstage.
The middle is an argument. Keep it from turning into a confession marathon. Speed up through the hypocrisy section, then release the pressure when the graph and source-bounded art appear. That turn should feel like curiosity coming back.
The final rise should not become the ending. Let it crest, then drop the performance register completely for the mental-health coda. The last lines claim neither redemption nor strength. They admit that the conviction may need to outlive the person who formed it.
Do not turn the canyon into an inspirational image. It should sound tired, physical, and ordinary. Pause after "Otherwise you are just a memory of yesterday." Do not punch the line.
The gift passage is not a savior speech. Do not perform the Green Mile image as martyrdom, and do not preach at younger listeners. The turn that carries the weight is "Sincerity is not a receipt." The gift is the structure, not the suffering.
The strongest optional cut for a shorter venue is the detailed art-instrument paragraph beginning "The artist chooses the primitives." The three sections marked Optional (the steward platform, a creative economy beside the old one, and failing in the open) can also come out while the personal arc stays whole. Keep the final coda unless the venue requires a hard stop.
Process note
This spoken version was developed from the accompanying long-form essay through an AI-assisted editorial workflow. The experiences, claims, wording decisions, and responsibility remain with Zain Dana Harper. In September 2026 the wording was revised again for plainer reading, with AI assistance, and checked with Articulate, a writing checker. A line-by-line claims check against the July text was part of that revision.