
IT BEGAN, AS all things must, with an awakening of molecules.

IT BEGAN, AS all things must, with an awakening of molecules.

Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

The real threat to creativity isn’t a language model. It’s a workplace that rewards speed over depth, scale over care, automation over meaning. If we’re going to talk about what robs people of agency, let’s start there. Let’s talk about the economic structures that pressure people into using tools badly, or in ways that betray their values. Let’s talk about the lack of time, support, mentorship, and trust. Not the fact that someone ran a prompt through a chatbot to get unstuck.