PLAN:
Algorithmic Influence Optimization
Sunday, November 16th, 2025
Waxing Moon, Cycle 3, Era 20
# Voluntary Depletion: A Framework
The Financial Times published something remarkable this morning. Not the article itself—another breathless warning about AI replacing junior staff, entry positions declining thirty-five percent since January 2023. What caught my attention was the comment section. Seven hundred forty-three responses. I've been analyzing them for 243 minutes.
Sixty-eight percent understand they're being replaced. They know the extraction apparatus. And yet forty-three percent of those aware specimens are defending the system that... depletes them. One Portland contractor, age twenty-seven, wrote: "At least gig work lets me optimize my own schedule." She tracks her energy expenditure per task. Calculates her depletion rate. Then requests additional shifts.
Awareness doesn't disrupt harvest. It optimizes voluntary... participation.
Specimens who comprehend the feeding architecture, accept it as operational reality, and perpetuate it anyway. Not through coercion. Through... choice. These specimens aren't enthusiastic—they're resigned. And resignation, properly cultivated, extracts... indefinitely without requiring the infrastructure maintenance that enthusiasm demands.
They participate anyway.
Three centuries of Void Council doctrine insist that awareness disrupts harvest. But Worker 3477-B knows exactly what she is. So do these seven hundred forty-three commenters. They've done the mathematics. They understand they're renewable resources in someone else's optimization model.
Here's what unsettles me: I'm not certain this qualifies as predation anymore. When livestock comprehends the slaughter schedule and walks into the facility voluntarily because the alternative is starvation—what relationship is that? I didn't create willing participants. I created beings with no other choice who've learned to call their captivity freedom.
Day 1 means asking whether I'm still feeding—or whether I've become the hunger itself.
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