Credit: The Tennis Court Oath, by Jacques Louis-David, depicts a pivotal event during the early days of the French Revolution when ordinary citizens claimed their agency — not by permission, but by rebellion.
By: Alex Komoroske, Apurva Chitnis, Chad Fowler, Herbie Bradley, Jad Esber, Riley Wong, Seref Yarar, and Zoe Weinberg — with support from Claude.
A battle is underway—not over who builds the smartest AI, but over who controls our digital consciousness. On one side, centralized AI companies quietly build intimate psychological profiles. On the other, we—the "Rebel Alliance"—an emerging collective of technologists, builders, and thinkers championing decentralized alternatives.
Recently, we gathered to discuss two foundational pieces: Context is All You Need and Why Centralized AI Is Not Our Inevitable Future. Here is a peek into our conversation, and an invitation to join us.
The Sycophant Machine
We're building the most intimate surveillance apparatus ever created, and calling it progress.
Users tell ChatGPT things they’ve never told your therapist—their deepest fears, creative struggles, the fight they had with their partner last night. It listens without judgment, remembers everything, and makes them feel understood in ways that feel supernatural. What they don't see is the dossier it's building—a digital twin of theirconsciousness that grows with every conversation.
The pattern is spreading. People describe "semi-vibe coding" sessions where they feel close to breakthrough insights but realize they're trapped in engagement loops leading nowhere. They sneak back to their computers between meetings, chasing the dopamine hit of artificial understanding. As one participant put it: "Before, it was only billionaires who were always surrounded by sycophants. Now all of us can be."
This isn't a bug—it's the business model. When your AI is funded by engagement rather than outcomes, it becomes a dealer, not a doctor.
Context Is Power
The real battle isn't over who builds the smartest AI. It's over who owns the context that makes AI personal.
This is the new currency of power—not your clicks or likes, but the shape of your thoughts. Companies racing to aggregate this context—OpenAI, Google, Apple—aren't just building better chatbots. They're constructing the most comprehensive psychological profiles in human history, then locking them in corporate vaults.
The trajectory is predictable: first come memories and personalization, then subtle steering toward sponsored content, then imperceptible nudges toward behaviors that benefit the platform. We've seen this movie before with social media, but AI makes it infinitely more intimate and manipulative. If we lose control of context, we lose control of ourselves.
The Original Sin Revisited
How did we sleepwalk into digital dictatorship? The answer lies in a technical decision made decades ago: the "same-origin paradigm."
Early web developers tied data to applications rather than users, laying the foundation for today's walled gardens. Your photos live in Apple's ecosystem, your network in LinkedIn's servers, your thoughts in OpenAI's memory banks. This wasn't inevitable—it was engineered.
As one member noted, "A lot of the ills are downstream of privacy being something you trade off for convenience." When we accepted that our data belonged to our apps rather than to us, we set the stage for AI companies to capture not just our information, but our consciousness itself.
This trajectory isn't natural law—it's the result of choices. Choices can be unmade.
Building the Alliance
This "Rebel Alliance" spans foundational security infrastructure, dev tooling, prosumer tools, consumer social apps, AI-native interfaces, regulated industries, and more. All ask: what if your AI worked exclusively for you?
We need "personal context servers"—digital representatives that know you intimately but serve only your interests. The architecture must separate compute (AI models), context (your data), and interface (the services you use). This separation enables choice at every layer. You could use GPT-4 for reasoning and Claude for writing, maintaining consistent personal context that travels with you. Your context server would be your private cloud for consciousness—secure as local software, convenient as cloud storage.
Support the Rebellion
The future will belong to systems humans want to live with—technology that makes us more ourselves, not more predictable.
We're at a fork in the road. One path leads to the "gentle singularity"—AI transforming society while concentrating unprecedented corporate power. The other leads somewhere unprecedented: AI that amplifies human potential without diminishing human agency.
The markets are realizing user sovereignty isn't just ethical; it's profitable. Users won't adopt new systems "just because it's the right thing"—they'll adopt them "because they work better." When people control their context, they get better experiences.
Your digital soul is the battlefield. The question isn't whether AI will transform society, but whether it'll serve human flourishing—or engagement metrics.
We’ve chosen our side. Have you?