Act 5
A divestment plan from extractive AI systems
With AI as a bounded tool in the process, not the thing you're escaping through.
Divestment here doesn't mean rejecting all technology or all AI. It means identifying which layer you're actually in — tool (bounded, task-specific, no memory of you, no stake in your attention) versus infrastructure built to be a relational participant (memory, personalization, engagement optimization, monetized intimacy) — and deliberately moving yourself out of the second one wherever you can, individually and structurally.
Tier 0 — Audit (one week)
List everything, and sort it into two columns. Don't act yet. Just see the shape of your own week. Most people find the second column is bigger than they expected — that's the point of the audit, not a failure.
Search, a specific coding or writing task, a calculator, a one-off question. You open it, get what you need, close it.
Anything with a streak, a notification, a "memory" feature that makes it feel like it knows you, a feed that never ends, a companion that greets you by name, a subscription tied to emotional access ("pay to keep me close").
Tier 1 — Behavioral boundaries (weeks 2–4)
- Turn off what you can: notifications, autoplay, "memory"/personalization toggles on anything infrastructure-shaped.
- Give tool-shaped AI use a hard edge — a specific question, a specific task, then close it. No open-ended drifting.
- For anything you use for emotional processing, add a mandatory human checkpoint: before or after, one message to an actual person about the same thing. Not instead of — alongside, every time.
- Name your late-night pattern if you have one, specifically. "I open X when I'm avoiding sleep and don't want to feel alone" is more useful than a vague resolution to "use it less."
If a boundary is very hard to hold, that's diagnostic information, not a personal failing — it's telling you which product was built well (from the company's perspective) to make boundaries hard to hold.
Tier 2 — Structural substitution (month 2)
- For each infrastructure-shaped habit, name one human-scale or community-scale substitute before you cut the habit, not after. Substitution beats subtraction.
- Redirect subscription money that was going to a companion app, dating app boost, or engagement-optimized service into something in the mutual-aid or peer-support layer instead.
- Where you can, choose smaller or open/local tools over hyperscaler products for tool-shaped tasks.
Tier 3 — Financial and structural exposure
- If you hold index funds or retirement accounts, check your exposure to the five companies capturing most of this value. You don't have to act on this, but it's worth seeing clearly.
- Support (or at minimum, track) policy efforts that touch the cost side of the ledger directly: companion-chatbot disclosure and safety laws (California's SB 243 is a live example), labor protections for content moderators and data annotators, data-center transparency requirements for energy and water use.
Tier 4 — Build the alternative
Individual divestment caps out fast if there's nothing to divest into.
Is the AI structuring and carrying something human-generated, or is it trying to be the source of the care itself? The first is infrastructure. The second is the pattern you're divesting from.
Your turn
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