Why does every AI post make you feel like you’re already behind?
And what happens when the technology we’re told we all need isn’t equally accessible to everyone?
These are the questions on my mind whenever I open any social media app. Every post seems to be another rebuke, another warning, another countdown disguised as text.
Whatever happened to the social part of social media?
Posts chase me with language pretending to be a ticking clock. I need to be defending myself by saying,
"No, I am not missing out on life!"
Like, I still find people living fine lives without knowing how to use e-mail.
These AI posts (and I feel most of them) make me feel dumb. As if designed to make people feel unskilled, uninformed, and already too late. That I'm late to the party to take any part of the so-called advantage.
Yes, there is an advantage. But not immediately learning every new tool does not mean we are being left behind. Technologies plateau. The tools that actually matter eventually become easier, more accessible, and widely understood. Look at smartphones. Eventually, nearly everyone knows how to use one.
The feeling that everyone else is earning $10,000 a month with AI is also a cheap marketing tactic.
"No, I am not letting some once-in-a-lifetime opportunity escape."
First-mover advantage is still only an advantage. It is not a solution to life.
The larger issue is what happens when companies first manufacture anxiety around a technology, then work to make that technology feel essential, while access remains limited by subscription tiers and token caps. To me, that means the amount of AI a person can use is increasingly determined by how much they can afford.
This is not only a question of pricing. It is a question of how power and access become concentrated.
We already know where concentrated power and restricted access can lead. Authoritarian systems depend on both. People have always resisted systems that deny them dignity, knowledge, and agency. While reading In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, I kept returning to the moment when Minerva first sees beyond the almost sacred image built around a political leader. What had appeared orderly and admirable was being sustained by realities she had never been allowed to see. It made me think about how easily progress, authority, and harm can exist inside the same system.
If AI becomes infrastructure for thinking, working, learning, and participating in society, access to it should not be socially rationed by the ability to pay. In fact, unlimited access to AI should be a human right.
The internet made knowledge more available, but higher education still rations credentials, guidance, and opportunity. Higher education, however, remained optional for many people. Meaning there were other ways to expand oneself.
AI, on the contrary, may not feel optional for long.
It could help close some of those old gaps reinforced by higher education, or reproduce them on an absurd scale through paywalls and token limits.
How absurd that becomes depends on how much access a person can afford under an AI company’s pricing structure. One current plan offers 20x the usage capacity for $200 a month. What prevents that from becoming 1,000x access for $1,000 a month tomorrow?
The companies telling us that everyone must adopt AI cannot then ration meaningful access according to who can afford the most tokens. If AI is going to become infrastructure, access cannot remain a luxury. We should be asking not only how quickly AI develops, but who gets to fully participate when it does.
The more interesting questions are: Who will pay for unlimited access to AI? And how do we distinguish necessary use from overconsumption?
So please, let’s play nicely, be a little more social, and stop turning access to AI into a game of musical chairs, where the people who can afford the most tokens keep their seats while everyone else is pushed out.
Originally published on LinkedIn
