Edition 002: What We Owe Each Other

My father died of cancer when I was four. I was diagnosed with cancer at age five. My mother was thirty-six, widowed, with a sick child and another child who needed her, and the systems around her — medical, legal, and social — had no real way to support our family. I survived. She endured. We went through so much more. And then last November, my closest friend and law partner went missing on Blood Mountain in Georgia and has not been found.

I am not telling you this to ask for your sympathy, though I won't refuse it. I am telling you this because these experiences have made something unmistakably clear: the system we live within was not built to see what matters. What remains — what has always remained — is not productivity or achievement or financial value. It is people. The ones who cannot be replaced.

***

You are a person who cannot be replaced. This time of yours is precious and limited, and I appreciate that you have given some of it to what I have to say. So let me ask you directly. Not in the abstract, and not as a philosophical exercise, but in the specific, material, legally consequential sense:

What do we owe each other?

What does the society organized around us owe the people living inside it? What does the corporation owe the person whose data it processes? What does the government owe the person it surveils? What does the AI system owe the person it decides about — perhaps in the middle of the night, without human review, without accountability, and without any mechanism for being told it got something wrong?

All of those questions have answers. The answers are encoded in law, in constitutional design, and in the financial architecture that governs how institutions treat people. And those answers — the ones the system gives, as opposed to the ones we tell ourselves it gives — are what this book is about.

***

I am not writing from outside this system. I am writing from within it, acknowledging my complicity as much as anyone else's. No one who lives in this culture comes to this with clean hands.

I am a lawyer. I practice data privacy and technology law in Texas. For my entire career, I have worked inside the systems this book describes — reading the contracts, advising the corporations, structuring the deals that determine what happens to your data, and counseling companies on how to deploy new technologies, including AI systems that may quietly make decisions about your life. I have watched, up close, how a handful of corporate choices are shaping everyone’s future.

I am also not who you might expect. I am not from Silicon Valley. I have never worked at a big technology company or an AI startup. I do not do venture capital. I am not a billionaire, an academic, a philosopher, or a podcaster with a following. And I am not a man, which seems to still be an implicit prerequisite for who gets taken seriously in conversations about technology.

I mention this not to claim outsider virtue. I mention it because the conversation about what these systems are doing to people has been narrow, and the narrowness is part of how we got here.

***

When I say the system, I mean the economic, legal, cultural, educational, and technical structures that surround our lives — what we have decided to protect, what we have decided to leave unprotected, and the choices, made by people across generations, about whose interests would be served and whose would not.

The system was built to see one kind of harm clearly: the kind that shows up on a balance sheet. Everything else — dignity, consent, memory, the worth of a person who cannot be replaced — it was built not to see. America has always been more comfortable protecting money than protecting people. Henrietta Lacks’s story is not an aberration in that system. It is a clear view of how it works.

***

The first thing this book asks of you is not outrage or despair. It is the willingness to look honestly at the system you are inside, and to see it clearly, without needing a villain to blame or a hero to rescue you.

This book will not give you a villain. The people who built these frameworks were not corrupt. The people running the corporations that control AI today are not corrupt in any ordinary sense. They are people operating inside a system that rewards certain decisions and imposes costs on others. The problem is not the people. That is not a reason for comfort. It is a reason for deeper concern.

There is no hero here either. Certainly not me. I am not asking you to trust my virtue. I am asking you to consider whether the argument is true.

What makes that hard is that we tend to think in binary terms. Heroes and villains. Good and evil. Right and wrong. It is what algorithms see and reward, what the political culture demands, and what the news cycle is built around. Then social media amplifies it and addicts us to it.

But the problems this book examines are not binary. They were not produced by bad people choosing bad outcomes. They were produced by a system — economic, legal, cultural, educational, technical — built around a specific and increasingly inadequate set of values, and operating as designed ever since.

So the questions to ask are not who is to blame, but: What values produced this? Whose interests does it serve? What would a different system look like? And what would it take to build one?

***

Henrietta Lacks's cells were taken from her body without her knowledge in 1951. The legal and institutional frameworks that allowed it were built by people who, by their own lights, were not doing anything wrong. The industry that grew from those cells was built the same way. Every step was a design choice. Every design choice can be changed.

But something has changed since 1951, and it is the next thing this book has to reckon with. The decisions that shape a person’s life are no longer made only by doctors who do not tell them, or institutions that do not ask. Increasingly, they are made by systems that do not know they are deciding — automated judgments rendered by machines that cannot be questioned, on records the person cannot see, against criteria the person was never told existed.

That is where we go next.