It’s 3:00pm and I’m restless. Another day further from living life on my terms. I can hear the world buzzing around me, slowly churning toward what it keeps calling “progress,” while I can’t help but be filled with rage over what “evolution” and “innovation” actually look like right now. Evolution according to tone-deaf tech bros whose idea of innovation is a cold graveyard of a world: machines in charge and serfs available for commodity use, courtesy of a job market they deliberately destabilized.

If you are someone like me, someone who has been in more rooms than she was ever comfortable being in, you already have a sense of where this was always going. The future for some people has always meant stripping power from labor long enough to consolidate it somewhere else. COVID was a wake-up call on both sides of the table, whether or not you were the kind of person who thought it was a “hoax.” Labor has power in numbers. And there are people whose entire wealth depends on workers never truly understanding that. Now those same people are making their own choices about your future. Not giving you control, just convenience.

Convenience. That’s a dirty word for me now.

Like most things that have been commodified, convenience is not a bad word at its origin. Even the concept itself is rooted in ease and contentment being within reach, something fundamentally human. Despite its seemingly generous forging, convenience has evolved from saving you time and effort into shackling you to a corporation and keeping you at the mercy of their interests in exchange for that highly sought-after ease. Think about companies like Netflix, whose entire model is built on making it “convenient” to access a library of content, until that convenience conflicts with their corporate interests, of course.

You might be pausing here and thinking: this is more cynical than inspirational. And you’re right. But the only thing this should inspire you to be right now is angry. Angry that a company has spent the bulk of its influence convincing you that it’s doing you a favor by removing your ability to own your own media. That it’s actually a gift, taking your money every month and deciding what portion of their library you have access to. After all, they know you better than you know yourself. All that data, all those inedible cookies they’re always collecting .

You don’t actually need to watch that last movie you enjoyed with your grandfather before he passed whenever you feel like it. Just wait for it to come back into the catalog. It’s more convenient that way, for them.

By now I’m absolutely sure you’re thinking this person sounds pretty damn cynical. Depending on the day, you’re right. Cynicism is a symptom of waking up in a world that becomes increasingly hostile with each passing year, an unfortunate manifestation of what happens when people with power convince themselves they know you better than you know yourself.

But when I woke up today, things felt a little different.

Like I had finally seen all I needed to see to remember: I would much rather be free than comfortable in someone else’s “convenience.”

And free people build things.