# Pick the Lock for Everyone

## Spoken version, roughly 27 to 36 minutes depending on cuts and pacing

*Zain Dana Harper, July 2026*

> This talk discusses suicidal depression, dissociation, substance use, violence, misogyny, shame, and harm to other people. It does not describe methods.

[Walk out. Stop. Let the room settle.]

I have never apologized.

I have said sorry. A lot.

I have explained myself until the explanation took up the whole room. I have hated myself loudly enough 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.

When I was sixteen I was suicidal, depressed, dissociating, acting out, and swallowing 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 how to find the loose board in the fence, and I called that intelligence.

[Pause.]

I became very good at locating the gap.

Give me a game and I would find the memory address. Give me a rule and I would find the part nobody enforced. Give me a relationship, let shame get close enough, and 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. Drink. Program. Make graphics tools. Modify games. Chase a strange technical question until four in the morning. 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. Make instruments. Ask stupid questions until something answers back. Find 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 so low that recognition from almost anybody felt like proof I existed. I found other people down there too. Real friendship. Music. Humor. Survival knowledge. Bad instruction. Damage dressed like 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. Different worlds. I was listening for swagger beside grief, beauty beside alienation, 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 before you get exploited. 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. Honesty until it costs status. Respect until cruelty earns the room. Work hard unless the shortcut belongs 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 after the danger moved.

Under that silhouette, under the actions and the performance of hardness, I still believe the same beautifully lit spirit exists somewhere in each of us. That does not erase the harm. It is why I think repair is worth building for.

I took another road, then spent years treating that turn as a permanent sentence. Every unfinished tool became proof that I had not really 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. The constant question of whether the light I found this week would become something real or another 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.

And this talk is not the apology they are owed. That has to happen without an audience, without control over the answer, and without the assumption that I get forgiven because I finally found the nerve to speak.

A confession can be another shortcut.

Shortcuts are my field.

I do not know whether I am ethically or morally pure. I know purity is a terrible entry requirement for repair. The least I can do is turn the skills I developed while looking for locks toward opening a door instead of finding another person to exploit.

[Shift. More conversational.]

Everybody keeps talking about black-box AI as though opacity showed up with neural networks.

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. We call fear discernment. We call status merit. We call property ethics. We call avoidance self-care.

I did the same thing at home.

When I lied, I edited somebody else's picture of reality without permission and then 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. The one that appears 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 that 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 because it sounds final. If I am rotten all the way through, nothing specific has to be repaired.

The useful sentence leaves me with 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. Replay. Provenance. A worker that cannot edit its own verifier. A system allowed to say `UNVERIFIABLE` and stop there.

My tools are existential dread in programmatic form. I got sick of how full of shit I could be and tried to build in the opposite direction.

Then it kind of became a thing.

[Pause.]

Khalil Gibran gave me the image that holds the political part of this together.

In *The Broken Wings*, Selma Karamy does not lose because she failed to make the 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, 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. But pedigree can hide inside ethics. Familiarity becomes authenticity. Difficulty becomes virtue. Membership becomes 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 prevent me from putting it on.

That applies to founders, rebels, artists, scientists, AI critics, anti-capitalists, and anybody else who has correctly identified a cage and therefore starts believing they are incapable of building 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.