Oct 06, 2025 12:00 AM
Oct 06, 2025 12:00 AM

DL 406

When Guardrails Become Competitive Disadvantages

Published: October 6, 2025 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate 406.

Last week in DL 405, we examined how tech elites prefer orderly, controllable systems over messy human life. This week provided the evidence. When Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded app removals, Apple complied immediately. When OpenAI's VP was asked about copyright protections in Sora 2, he said guardrails create "competitive disadvantages." When Meta faced pressure to monetize AI, they announced mining your chatbot conversations for ad targeting.

The ideology isn't hidden anymore. It's operating in plain sight.

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🔖 Key Takeaways

📚 Recent Work

This week I published the following:

🚨 App Removals: Redefining "Vulnerable"

Apple removed ICEBlock this week after Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the DOJ to request its takedown. Google removed a similar app called Red Dot. Both apps let people anonymously report ICE officer sightings—tools for communities to protect themselves from immigration enforcement.

Google's reasoning reveals the power inversion: ICE agents, they claimed, are a "vulnerable group" requiring protection.

Read that again. The state enforcement apparatus with detention authority, weapons, and legal immunity is "vulnerable." The undocumented families those agents target are not.

This pressure test made the choice visible. Companies that position themselves as defenders of privacy and user safety surrendered those principles immediately when political authority demanded it. The apps weren't removed for violating policies. They were removed because someone with power asked.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, TikTok's license was restored only after the company provided government-requested user activity data from protest periods.

This isn't platforms caught off guard. This is the system working as designed: control embedded so deep it operates invisibly until activated by those who hold authority.

💰 Ethics Explicitly Named as Market Handicap

OpenAI launched Sora 2 on September 30, a TikTok-style app generating AI videos with sound. Within three days it became the #3 app. It's also generating widespread copyright infringement: SpongeBob, Pokémon, Mario, Star Wars characters flooding the platform.

Why? An OpenAI VP explicitly stated they didn't want "too many guardrails" because it would create a "competitive disadvantage."

The anti-human ideology, spoken plainly. Human protections—copyright law, safety constraints, ethical boundaries—framed as market handicaps. The choice wasn't "do the right thing slowly" versus "move fast." The choice was abandoning protections entirely because caring about consequences makes you lose to competitors who don't.

🔇 Internal Dissent Crushed, Privacy Monetized

At Meta, leadership changed FAIR's (Fundamental AI Research) publishing rules to require additional review before researchers can share findings. The move angered staff enough that Yann LeCun considered resigning.

The same week, Meta announced new monetization: starting December 16, your conversations with Meta's AI chatbots will be used to personalize advertising.

The pattern crystalizes. Internal voices raising concerns are silenced. Intimate conversations—the kind people have with AI companions seeking emotional support or problem-solving help—are commercialized. The pressure to monetize everything crushes both researcher autonomy and user privacy.

This isn't a mistake or oversight. It's the logical outcome when companies must choose between protecting people or protecting revenue. Revenue wins every time.

🏫 Locking Control into Infrastructure

In Austin, Alpha School launched a $40,000/year model where AI software delivers most instruction during a two-hour morning block. Human adults serve as "guides." Mentors, not teachers. The message is explicit: algorithmic instruction is the core product; humans are support staff.

Meanwhile, OpenAI's Stargate project consumes approximately 40% of global DRAM output 900,000 wafers per month. The AI boom operates on manufactured scarcity and resource hoarding, making infrastructure both essential and inaccessible to alternatives.

This is control through dependency. Once global supply chains prioritize AI infrastructure, the choice to remove them disappears. You can't unplug what you've made essential.

🤔 Consider

Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.

― Jane Goodall

This week's pattern is clear:

When care conflicts with control, control wins.

But Goodall's progression points to why documentation matters. Understanding what happened this week—OpenAI explicitly calling ethics a "competitive disadvantage," Google redefining ICE agents as "vulnerable"—is the necessary first step. Without understanding, we can't care. Without caring, we won't act.

OpenAI didn't abandon guardrails because they lack resources. They're valued at $500 billion. They abandoned them because they crave more: more users, faster growth, competitive dominance. Meta doesn't need to monetize your intimate AI conversations. They need to satisfy the insatiable demand for increasing revenue. These companies are controlled by accumulation rather than controlling their ethical direction.

When companies explicitly frame ethics as competitive disadvantages, when platforms remove tools protecting vulnerable people while calling enforcers "vulnerable," neutrality becomes complicity. Every adoption decision is moral. Every silent acceptance feeds the system.

The choice isn't whether to take a side. The choice is whether to recognize which side the systems have already chosen, and whether understanding that is enough to move us from awareness to care, and from care to action.

⚡ What You Can Do This Week

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