Throughout a large portion of my life, I have been at the center of, or at least close to, issues that have shaped American society and are now rippling outward across the Western world.
This isn't a credential. It's a pattern I can't unsee.
The Bubbles
During my college years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was studying computer science and working side jobs as a web designer. Technologically, that meant having design skills and being able to string together HTML — simple stuff. But because I was inside that world, I could see what was coming. I remember the moment clearly: sitting around after smoking a joint, thinking about how much of a scam the dot-com bubble was. The details have faded, but the clarity hasn't. It was all so exaggerated, so fake. And it was all going to come crumbling down. The money crashed, but the technology lived on.
After college, I worked in what was essentially a boiler room — think The Wolf of Wall Street, but on a much smaller scale. I didn't make any real money there, but I spent several years getting a visceral introduction to the brutality of the financial markets and the type of people attracted to that environment. I also got a glimpse of the type of person you eventually become if you stay.
From there — and looking back, I'm not sure why I made this decision, since the signs of the real estate bubble were already visible — I got into home loans and mortgage brokering. I wanted to improve my sales and communication skills and through a friend, fate put me on the ground floor of an even bigger financial scam than the dot-com bubble. That ended, obviously, in the spectacular crash of 2008.
I'll be honest: even as I was making those loans, I think I was still chasing financial wealth. I saw from the inside the types of loans being made to people who didn't have the sophistication to understand what they were signing. And I could see how, in such a supposedly regulated market, all of it was perfectly legal. I understand my part in that. It's not something I'm proud of.
Before America
But to understand why these experiences hit me the way they did, you need to know where I come from.
I was born in Chile. The grandson of a German Jew who fled to South America for reasons that should be obvious. My immediate family was tortured under the Chilean dictator Pinochet — a dictator installed by an American coup. That history pushed us, not directly but eventually, to flee to the United States. To the very country that had set it all in motion.
I grew up in Los Angeles living a normal life, but maybe having to grow up a little faster than most. A stint with cancer in my early teens will do that. And I think I was always at least a little politically aware — my sociology classes in college fascinated me. I remember protesting the Iraq war and being a part of, I think, one of the largest demonstrations in American history. (The AI editing this essay informs me it was actually the largest — ever. Six to ten million people. Worldwide.) I saw what that resulted in: nothing but hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq and fortunes in the pockets of the powerful and well connected. But it was the 2008 crash that really lit the fuse.
Seeing how the financial industry had preyed upon hard-working people, close to me, not in some far-away foreign land — and knowing that I had been a part of it — motivated me to get involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Now, for those of you thinking "Who is this commie lefty?" — I'd suggest you grapple with the fact that one of the easiest ways we are controlled is through the labels that those in power assign to us. Labels that keep us divided. Give this a chance. You'll see that you can't easily pigeonhole my politics. I remember seeing the Tea Party movement and agreeing with at least some of their stances. Even back then, I noticed how conveniently the media framed Occupy to fit established narratives.
The most important thing I learned from that experience: the media lies and manipulates, and they are nowhere near as impartial as they claim to be. And the second lesson is that all presidents end up betraying us. Obama did nothing to prosecute those responsible for the financial crash. His cabinet was filled with people who were deeply involved in well known crimes, either financial or war-related. In fact, he took the war on terror and supersized it. Yup, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Another institution full of shit.
The Revelations
Then came the next major event — among so fucking many that I can't even keep track anymore, and that I know that I am skipping — when Snowden revealed the extent of government surveillance. What many had long suspected without evidence, Snowden courageously confirmed.
And in between all the wars America engaged in, all the torture, all the illegal acts — that was one of the reasons I left the US. I didn't want my tax dollars funding that shit.
I ended up in Germany after spending most of my life in Los Angeles. It was an abrupt, spontaneous move with very little planning. I got back into software development because it was the easiest way to survive financially in a new land with a new language I knew basically nothing about.
And then, in 2022, while I was building a new life in Germany, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. Germany's direct lifeline to affordable gas, destroyed in an act of sabotage. The evidence pointing toward American involvement has only grown stronger over time[1], and yet Europe's response was... silence. My adopted country, attacked by its supposed ally, and nothing. No investigation with teeth, no diplomatic consequences, no public outrage from the leaders who were supposed to protect their citizens' interests. And what kind of impact has that had on us? How much more are we paying for energy? Do you think this isn't at least one of the main causes of the struggling economy? We had cheap gas, and we blew it... or technically, the US blew it.
The US has so much power that when it acts — whether through coups in Chile and throughout Latin America, wars in Iraq, Iran and throughout the Middle East, or sabotage in the Baltic Sea — the ripple effects reshape the lives of all of us. You can leave America, but you can't escape its punch.
The Machine Gets Smarter
Somehow I survived the brutal initiation of becoming a professional software developer in a foreign land, and after seven years, I started hearing about AI.
I knew almost immediately that this would be life-changing. And now, two or three years later — I guess I don't even know how long anymore — the reality of how true that statement is weighs on me. Digs itself into my soul.
I'm now an AI lead at my company. I work intimately with a technology that is both fascinating and terrifying. I remember, maybe two to three months ago, I had heard enough CEOs and leaders in the AI space talk about how everyone, and specifically governments, were not seriously considering the advances in AI with enough concern or preparation for what was coming, that it started to scratch at the back of my mind. As the months went on and the tooling around AI became much more accessible, I started applying it directly to my day-to-day life. I could easily create workflows and automate things that would not have been possible before with this much ease. Coupled with the insight that AI is giving me, and its many arms reaching into my digital life, the experience is transformative. The impact demonstrates a power that has triggered a couple of existential crises. I am once again losing sleep.
The Breaking Point
I say that I'm losing sleep again because I had the same trouble starting at the end of 2023. Although that time it was much worse, even though it was based on a nightmare farther away. A nightmare I really wish I hadn't woken up to.
I'm referring to the genocide in Palestine. In Gaza.
I couldn't sleep for three or four months. I'm not sure how no one at work did not notice. I don't even know how I didn't get fired. No one said anything. My acting skills must be much better than I realize.
But it woke me up — to everything. All those thoughts and ideas from college, when I was disgusted by Western power and abuse. They came flooding back, sharper now, validated by reality, by experience.
I can guarantee you that most of you reading this have not seen a fraction of the videos, stories and information that Palestinians were able to share and get past all the propaganda, all the prepared statements, all the falsehoods attempted to make us look away from what some of us could not avoid. I had never so clearly seen the horrors of what an empire does when a people refuse to surrender. I still tear up when I think about all the kids that I have seen with missing skulls, guts hanging out, with torn off limbs, with their entire families evaporated, starving, looking for a safe place to sleep, crying out for mercy and for attention from a world that could not care enough, because there are so many funny animal videos on your favorite social media. I think of my own kids and I cannot imagine, I do not want to imagine, what it must be to be them. I am not religious, but I have seen the devil, an idea I would have thought to be ignorant just a few years ago.
I went to a Catholic high school, but I can tell you that I paid zero attention in my religion classes. God, what a waste of time I found them to be. I recently learned that one of the foundational ideas in Catholic theology — one I must have slept through — is that evil isn't a force of its own. It's what fills the space when good people do nothing. "If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is sin for them." After a lifetime of being an atheist, things have gotten so bad in my world that I am reconsidering all the foundations of what I believe in. But don't believe that I have forgotten all the atrocities of the Catholic Church either. I think I remember hearing that there is some connection to Epstein there as well.
What is happening in Palestine continues. There is no real ceasefire. The Israeli military, and settlers in the West Bank, keep killing Palestinians daily — more children, more women, more innocent people who are only trying to reclaim what was taken from them. Their heritage. Their land. This has been going on since 1948.
How could something so obvious, sitting right under our noses, be so well hidden for so long? That's when I started to realize how easily we are distracted by shiny objects. Kept from thinking about the fundamentals — how our lives are structured, the institutions set up to maintain a facade of values and justice. If the UN, which was created originally with the primary intention of avoiding another genocide, cannot prevent the genocide that we are all witnessing live, that cannot be deleted despite any amount of Hasbara — Israel's state-funded propaganda machine — then what? I just don't have the words.
I mean, it's been obvious all along. Shit — remember, I was born in Chile.
But Gaza also revealed something unexpected. Remember what I said about Occupy and the Tea Party? That instinct I had — that the left-right divide is a tool of control — Gaza confirmed it completely. I've seen people from across the entire political spectrum standing together against this genocide. Conservatives, leftists, libertarians, people who would never agree on anything else, or so we are led to believe. When the horror is this naked, the labels fall away. And that tells you everything about what those labels were for in the first place. Those divisions that the media and those in real power work so hard to foment, are paper thin. We agree on more than we understand. One of my college professors put it simply: we are all so alike that the only thing we notice are our differences.
The Mask Comes Off
And if a livestreamed genocide accepted by the Western world wasn't enough, then came the Epstein files. Millions of files detailing the Epstein class — people who move across the borders we're told are so important, with complete impunity. The media keeps focusing on the sexual abuse and torture of children, but the deeper story here is the blackmail operation and the ties to Israeli and American intelligence. The same intelligence that brought about the coup in Chile. The same intelligence that Snowden warned us about.
There are many damning revelations in those files. It seems like Epstein was involved as an influential figure in so many monumental and world-changing events. If you want to see how deep this goes, Ian Carroll's research is a good starting point[2]. There is no way that one person could have done all that without the support of a type of network that I think is hard to imagine or comprehend. Even if you just take the abuse and torture that they are responsible for, what does that say about how they view us, our children? We are beneath them. And these people have the sort of power that keeps them from being prosecuted, for decades, and some, many, never. It has been said that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but in this case I think we can say that the wheels have fallen off, and shit ain't moving folks... unless you are a hard working Mexican day laborer in the U.S., then ICE deports your dirty ass in a blink.
But everyone should forget about those irrelevant files, because Iran has nuclear weapons! Boom goes the dynamite.
Part of me thinks we're all just bumbling idiots, myself included. But then I remember that we're all so busy trying to survive, trying to navigate an impossibly complicated world. My sympathy and patience returns.
But it stops at the point where I'm faced with those among us — and sadly, those who tend to rise to power — who exercise absolutely no sympathy. Maybe the opposite. Something that looks like hatred toward the rest of us. It is so foreign to me. And I feel sorry for them, because I can't imagine what it took for them to become those kinds of people.
And here, the sympathy creeps out again, but my condemnation stands firm.
Why I'm Writing This
At this point, I don't know how it could be any more obvious what kind of reality we're facing. I don't understand where those in power think this leads. The outright violence and disregard for life — whether through acts of overt brutality against people or through the slow destruction of climate change reshaping the world we've known.
I'm aware this comes from a privileged Western perspective. I know that throughout this whole time, many people on this planet have been suffering realities I can't even describe. I'm aware of the position I'm in.
And so, going back to my professional life and what I've learned about technology and now AI — and making the connections between what those in power are capable of and the power that lies behind artificial intelligence — this concerns me deeply.
What I have to share, I believe, has value. Not because I'm more intelligent than anyone else. It's because I've been lucky — or unlucky — enough to live through experiences that have helped me understand connections that are difficult for most people to make.
I've watched bubble after bubble inflate and burst. I've seen who profits and who pays. I've lived inside the financial machinery that preys on ordinary people. I've seen what empire does to countries like the one I was born in, the one my heart aches for, and the one I currently call home. I've watched the surveillance state get confirmed and then shrugged off. I've seen a genocide livestreamed while the Western world looked away, and worse, actively supported. In the last few days, we are seeing the latest evolution of horror as we bomb yet another Middle Eastern country on recycled pretexts that we know are untrue.
And now I work with the technology that may lock the cage forever.
If even one person reads this and starts making the same connections, then it was worth writing. And if not — well, we are all kind of fucked anyways. I'm not a doomer. I'm an engineer at heart. I always find solutions to the problems that I face, and I know that I will find ways to work through this, personally. What we are facing here is much larger than my own personal experience and future, though.
One last irony: although the ideas and content are mine, this was edited by an AI. It was an AI that helped me realize that the notes I'd been keeping to myself contained something worth sharing with others. I hope it's not hallucinating in this case.