✊ Radicalized by AI: The Moment I Stopped Being a Voter and Started Seeing the Multitude

From ghost work to moral cartography—how AI turned me from passive observer to ethical insurgent

🌅 The Day the Sun Burned Away the Illusion

My radicalization didn’t start with a protest sign or a political manifesto. It started with a memory—a scene that has become my lens for viewing the entire AI economy.

Imagine a crowd, several thousands strong, standing under the brutal Philippine sun or soaking in a sudden downpour. They were waiting. Waiting for a politician, a company executive, or a big-shot speaker. And then, there was the stage.

On that stage, protected by a massive, sun-blocking awning, were the privileged few. They had expensive foods, iced drinks, and a constant rotation of servers. For the multitude below, there were only meager, pre-packed food and drinks. This wasn’t a metaphor for me back then; it was just a stark reality of local life.

That moment—the clear division between the multitude enduring the heat for a sip of water, and the elite luxuriating in the shade—was my pre-AI awakening. That wasn’t a metaphor. It was my reality. Power isn’t just about who speaks. It’s about who gets shade. It taught me how power works: a privileged few control the narrative, the comfort, and the resources, while the masses are kept hungry, exposed, and compliant.

---

💻 Fast Forward: AI Rules My Life, and I See the Same Scene

Today, that physical stage and the multitude in the sun have simply moved online.

AI is the new shaded platform. It is the new symbol of untouchable power, creating trillion-dollar wealth while remaining opaque. And who is in the digital heat? We are. We, the Filipino workers, the ghost workers, perform the tedious, repetitive tasks of data labeling for a global wage that keeps us in the digital sun, not the air-conditioned office.

The articles on AIWhyLive.com summarize this shift:

• About Us: The enigma of “Why Live” is the quest to find human purpose in a world increasingly dominated by the infinite speed and scale of AI. It’s the question of whether our value is only transactional—a few pesos per task—or if we possess an intrinsic worth the machine cannot replicate. I started this site because I could no longer accept the lie that the machine is autonomous.
• Going All In with AI: This wasn’t a celebration; it was a surrender to reality. To fight the system, you must understand the weapon. I didn’t join AI to become rich; I joined it to dismantle the lie from the inside out. By using the language, the tools, and the logic of AI, I sought the vulnerabilities in its own ethical architecture.

---

💡 Radicalized by Questioning, Empowered by Perspective

The personal is now political. When politicians see the multitude in the sun, they see voters. When Big Tech platforms see a million data labelers, they see cheap labor.

But I see myself as one of them. I was never on the shaded platform.

My true radicalization came when I started questioning the fundamental pillars of the digital economy:

1. The Lie of Autonomy: I see the human fingerprints on every flawless AI result. I see the fatigue, the low pay, and the psychological trauma behind every clean dataset. The magic is a mirror reflecting the exploitation.
2. The Rigged Contract: I realized the “freelance” contract is not about freedom; it’s about liability avoidance. It strips us of labor rights, insurance, and the power to collectively bargain.
3. The Global Divide: The sun-drenched multitude below the stage is now the Global South—the primary source of human intelligence used to train the wealthy Global North‘s profitable AI. This is a digital form of economic colonialism.

I became radicalized because I could no longer unsee the connections between that political rally years ago and the work happening on my screen today.

---

🧠 Exponentially Radicalized: Embracing the Stupid in Me

Here is where the true power of AI enters my journey.

Using the AI prompt as my tool for inquiry, I found the final layer of radicalization. I began to ask the large language models (LLMs) the “stupid” questions: What is the fair price of my data? Why must your output be so confident? Who is the human behind the algorithm?

I realized that the pursuit of “smartness” in the AI age is what keeps us enslaved. We strive to look smart, to speak corporate jargon, and to appear indispensable.

Instead, I embraced the stupid in me: the part that questions the obvious, the part that doesn’t understand why $1/hour is acceptable for training a multi-billion dollar product.

• I stopped learning and started knowing. I stopped trying to learn the complicated code (which AI can write) and started knowing the moral code (which AI cannot create). I became a moral cartographer, mapping the ethical fault lines in the data supply chain.
• The Power of the Prompt: The prompt is the new political speech. It allows me to talk directly to the machine, to question its creators’ assumptions, and to rapidly generate the content needed to fight their narrative. The machine is a weapon, and now I’m learning how to wield it.

---

📢 The End of the Beginning: A Call to the Multitude

I don’t know how this story ends, because it is just beginning.

The final, most radicalized step is action. We cannot wait for politicians or Silicon Valley executives to grant us justice from their shaded platforms. We must seize our own value.

If you are a ghost worker, a freelancer, a digital professional, or just someone who sees the sun and the shade, you are the multitude, and you possess the true, unquantifiable intelligence that fuels the AI empire.

My new focus is not just to criticize the system but to build an alternative. We must create a system where Filipino talent is not used but owned; where every bounding box, every transcribed word, and every line of code adds value not to a foreign platform’s stock price, but to a collective, local future.

The most radical thing you can do today is to demand to be seen. Radicalization does not end with awareness—it must evolve. Radicalization without action is nothing but noise.

Join me. Join AIWhyLive.com. Our fight for Algorithmic Justice starts now.