No one knows you. That's by design.
What we lose when technology mediates the space where we form decisions.
You can sit with that sentence for a moment. It is not an accusation. It is the actual shape of being alive.
You have spent your life inside a head no one else has been inside. The thoughts you have not said. The version of yourself you became in the last month, and have not yet told anyone about. The quiet revisions you make to who you were a year ago. The thing you almost said yesterday and chose not to. Everything that matters about you is happening in a place no other person, no friend, no partner, no parent, no employer, no algorithm, has ever entered. You are unknown to them, by design, because that is what being a person is.
This is not a deficit. It is the condition.
If you have ever felt misread — and you have — that was not a failure of the people around you. It was the architecture of being human bumping up against the limits of what a human is. You are not knowable from the outside. You can be loved from the outside, served from the outside, accompanied from the outside. You cannot be known from the outside. No one can. This has been true for every person who has ever lived.
I want you to sit with that for one more moment, because the technology argument that follows only lands if you have actually felt the truth of it. Take a breath. Notice the noticer behind your eyes. That is the part of you no one has ever met.
So, what have we been building, as an industry, for the last thirty years?
We have been building tools that pretend you are knowable.
The entire architecture of modern consumer and enterprise technology — the surveillance pricing, the behavioral scoring, the engagement-optimized feeds, the predictive targeting, the recommendation engines, the workplace monitoring layers — rests on a single assumption: that a human is a target that can be aimed at. A target has to be defined to be aimed at. So the assumption beneath every dashboard and every model is that you have a shape stable enough to be predicted, narrow enough to be addressed, and consistent enough to be sold to.
This is not how a person is.
A person is in continuous becoming. The version of you that opens this email is not the version of you who would open it tomorrow morning, and neither one is the version of you who will close your laptop in five minutes. The systems pretending to target you have to assume those three versions are the same person, because otherwise their entire architecture collapses. So they make you the same person — not by knowing you, they cannot — but by constraining you.
We have spent thirty years building systems that cannot know you, so they learned to constrain you instead. The recommendation narrows what you watch next. The feed narrows what you read. The price narrows what you can afford to choose. The score narrows what doors open. Over time, the system stops trying to understand you and starts producing a version of you it can manage.
The target becomes real because the system makes it real.
This has been the discipline of the last few decades of technology, and it has been mostly defensive — defending against churn, defending market share, defending revenue, defending against the competitor doing the same thing. Defensive building has a logic: I cannot know my user, so I will constrain my user into something I can address. The capture is the cost of that logic. The cover stories — freedom, choice, personalization, efficiency — are the language the industry uses to avoid naming that the user is being made smaller in order to be made addressable.
The next layer of technology cannot work this way, and if we do not understand the mode we have been in, we will hand the next layer the same instructions and find out what they do at scale.
The next layer is AI.
What is different about AI is not that it amplifies — every prior wave of technology has amplified. What is different is that it begins to sit between you and the formation of your own decisions. Previous systems optimized around the choices you made. These systems increasingly shape what choices appear in the first place.
I am not arguing against filtering. A person moving through the world needs it. The real question is whose logic the filtering runs on.
Today, that logic is almost never yours. It is either the accumulated patterns of everyone the system has ever observed, or whatever it can infer about you in a single moment. One treats you as a coordinate in a distribution. The other treats you as a snapshot. Neither consults the actual person who is still in the process of becoming.
And this compounds. What one person encounters becomes part of what the next person sees. What the system reinforces becomes easier to reinforce again. Over time, the space inside which someone forms intentions and makes choices is shaped by what the system finds easy to render.
Earlier systems influenced what people did. This one influences what occurs to people to do — and the logic doing the influencing is not yours.
When you hand a system that compounds through use the instructions of defensive building — target the user, narrow them, predict them, capture them — you are not just shipping the old capture at a louder volume. You are shipping a system whose feedback will discover capture strategies you did not design, in domains you never authorized. The capture extends itself.
The defensive mode worked, more or less, when the systems carrying it were bounded. AI is not bounded in the same way. The defense, at this scale, becomes its own kind of harm. And what is being made smaller, every day, is people — not abstractly, but the actual Humans on the other side of every dashboard.
If we hand AI the old instructions, we are not preserving what we have. We are committing to an acceleration we will not be able to walk back, because the system will be moving faster than the people trying to correct it.
So the shift is not optional. It begins with a different instruction to ourselves.
This is not an argument against listening to people. Listen more. Study more. Observe more carefully. But do not mistake research for possession. Do not mistake a segment for a soul, a behavior pattern for an intention, or a model for the person it approximates. You can learn from people. You cannot become the interior authority over them.
If you are building technology, you cannot build for a person you cannot know. So stop trying. Build instead for the only person whose interior you have any access to — yourself. Not the demographic self. Not the persona. The actual you — the one behind the noticer, the one who is also in continuous becoming. Build the thing you would actually want, designed the way you would want it, for the version of yourself you are trying to grow into rather than the version you are trying to defend.
This is not a smaller move than building for a market. It is larger in a different direction. When you build from the version of yourself that has done the inner work — the one staying in the driver’s seat rather than outsourcing it to your own navigation systems — you are building from a real person. What genuinely serves that person has a way of serving other real people, even though you can never know them. You are not building for a model. You are building from one.
The technology that comes out of this is different. Measurably different. It does not need to predict you, because it is not trying to capture you. It does not need to know you, because it is not trying to address you. It serves intention as it forms, which is the only honest moment to serve a person, because that is the only moment the person exists in a form anyone can act on. The first document of the People-First Approach, at albeik.com, develops this into a design discipline. Here it is enough to see the direction.
We will not get there in one move. Some of what we ship during this transition will still carry the defensive shape, because the conditions still demand some defense. The discipline is the direction. Every release can carry a little less of the targeting logic than the one before it. Generation by generation, the target shrinks. The capture reduces. Eventually — long after any of us are still building — what comes out the other end is technology built from creation, by people who have done the work of becoming the kind of person whose work serves rather than captures. The best time to begin is now, because the layer being shipped this year is the one that sets the trajectory.
I would guide you to hold two questions in your creative journey.
For anything you build, fund, or deploy: am I defending, or am I making? Who am I building for — a target I have constructed, or a person I actually am?
For anything you encounter: what is this asking me to be, in order for it to work?
In the end, no one knows you, and that is by design. It is not a wound to be fixed — it is the condition of being a person. The technology we build over the next decade will either honor that condition or work against it.
I know you would rather honor it, because you want it for yourself. There are more of you than the industry believes.
— Haitham
What a banger of a launch post!!
Thank you for the two beautiful questions.
Am I building for someone I'm constructing, or for who I am,
and
who do I need to become for this to work?