CONCEPT
Gatekeepers of Connection
The infrastructure-control power concentrated in AI companies that determine which connections are possible — a category of gatekeeping without precedent in the history of social networks.
In traditional social networks, gatekeeping power is distributed and organic. The bridging individual controls information flow across a single structural hole but cannot reshape the entire network topology. The AI transition concentrates gatekeeping power in a way without precedent. The companies that build large language models are not merely participants — they are the architects of the infrastructure through which an expanding share of cross-domain connection occurs. They determine training data, response behavior, and access terms. This is infrastructure control rather than bridging, and the distinction matters enormously for understanding who benefits from the AI transition and who bears its costs.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The training corpus is not the entire landscape of human thought. It is a specific, historically contingent sample — over-representing English-language academic publications, digitized Western documents, and cultural traditions whose institutions produced the text streams now feeding AI systems. Oral traditions, indigenous knowledge, and non-digitized cultural production are largely absent. The corpus reflects the biases of institutions whose output