May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor (Unless You Need AI to Think Straight)
By: Paco Campbell
Published: Thursday, July 2nd, 2026
The Capitol talked about the Hunger Games like they were a gift — a tradition, a ceremony, a fair shot for anyone brave enough to take it. All you needed was courage. Or luck. And maybe a mentor who wasn’t day-drinking through their own survivor’s guilt.
They delivered that message with rhinestone sincerity, wrapped in pink wigs, holographic eyeliner, and feathered capes you could lose most lap dogs inside of.
Our version delivers the same speech. Just in muted Patagonia vests, without the courtesy of camp. AI will empower every person. This is the great equalizer. A renaissance for the whole world. That’s Nadella, Altman, and Amodei, by the way.
They seem to believe it. The Capitol believed it too. Belief is easier when you’re sitting in the good seats.
The Scaffolding I’m Standing On
Personally, I spend around $300 a month on AI tools. That’s over $3,600 a year — which sounds reasonable until you say it out loud as a monthly obligation. Let me elaborate.
My brain runs ADHD + OCD with just a dash of autism — wired for multiverse thinking in a world that rewards single-threaded execution. AI has become the scaffolding for it. Not a replacement for how I think. Just the thing that keeps ideas from evaporating mid-sentence like cheap cologne. Structure for what is, functionally, a golden retriever on its third RedBull.
I subscribe to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Mistral. They all have their place and strengths in my stack. It looks like madness from the outside, I’m aware. It has genuinely allowed me to better lasso this brain of mine in ways that therapy or medication have, honestly, never empowered me to.
So when someone says “AI is for everyone,” I don’t hear a slogan. I hear a question. Because access, for me, required a job, a credit card, hardware that doesn’t quit when you open a second tab, time to learn the tools, and the psychological bandwidth to experiment with something that wasn’t designed with my brain in mind.
And I started from a reasonably good position.
Let’s be direct: this piece is written from the paid tier, for other people in the paid tier, about a problem most of us benefit from without examining too closely. The people this piece describes aren’t the ones reading it. The audience here has institutional proximity to these decisions. That’s not guilt; that’s leverage. Use it.
The Reaping Isn’t Random
There’s a version of this conversation that treats access as a simple on/off switch — you either have internet, or you don’t, and if you do, AI is yours. That version is wrong, and the wrongness is layered.
Consistent electricity isn’t guaranteed across significant parts of the American South, let alone the world. A functional device means something that can run a modern browser — not the phone held together by a cracked screen and unearned optimism that half the planet is using. Broadband means broadband, not a mobile hotspot that throttles when you need it. And above all of that sits literacy — not reading literacy, but the conceptual fluency these tools silently assume you already speak.
Clear all those gates and you’ve arrived at: the free tier. Which is not the same product that paying customers use. Smaller model, less memory, tighter limits. It is to the paid experience what a bus schedule is to a car — technically transportation, structurally different in every way that matters when you’re running late.
There’s a version of software access that used to work differently. A pirated copy of Photoshop on a cheap laptop in 2003 still ran Photoshop. The file lived on the machine. Nobody could revoke it. A kid in Lagos or Guadalajara with a cracked copy of AutoCAD could spend years building real skills on real software. Modern AI doesn’t work that way. The model isn’t on your computer — it’s on a server, behind a login, attached to a billing cycle. The moment you stop paying, or the moment your connection fails, or the moment the company decides your country’s payment infrastructure isn’t worth supporting, the tool is gone. Open-source models exist, but running them locally requires hardware most people reading this don’t own and expertise most people anywhere don’t have. The gate is back. It just looks like a subscription now.
If everything is cloud, what does the BSA even do these days?
The Cornucopia Is Not for You
The free tiers exist. OpenAI gives you a model that behaves like it got bonked on the head with something heavy. Anthropic lets you use Claude until it quietly suggests you’ve had enough. Google Gemini is your co-pilot right up until you need it to remember something, at which point it looks at you like you’ve asked it to parallel park a school bus in the dark.
None of this is “AI for all.” It’s the Costco toothpick version of cognition — looks abundant from a distance, until you sprint toward the Cornucopia and realize someone arrived faster, with better gear, and already took the good stuff.
The Career tributes from Districts 1 and 2 don’t win because they’re braver. They win because they started training before the other kids knew the Games were real.
The Capitol Has a Research Team, Too
Nobody is announcing that AI is for the already-advantaged. The structure does it, without a press release.
An IMF working paper published last year found that higher-income, higher-skilled workers aren’t just using AI more — their work is structurally more complementary to it. The advantage doesn’t just hold; it compounds. European survey data shows GenAI usage clustering among younger, urban, higher-income populations, mapping almost perfectly onto existing infrastructure divides.
Domestically, the story got worse in 2024. The Affordable Connectivity Program — a federal subsidy helping 23 million low-income households afford broadband — was killed in June. Ookla measured what followed: the urban-rural gap widened in 32 states. The FCC counted roughly 26 million Americans still without minimum-standard broadband, concentrated in rural areas and tribal lands.
When the program keeping people connected gets defunded the same year AI becomes infrastructure, that’s not a coincidence you get to call a coincidence.
About Those Wigs
If you’re going to declare that AI is democratizing opportunity with a straight face, at minimum, commit to the aesthetic. Wear the wig. Bring the eyeliner. Give me a cape with enough plumage to make PETA pay attention. Give me Effie Trinket’s full commitment, because at least she was honest about what kind of event she was hosting.
Instead: grayscale Patagonia, a glass of water, and a rehearsed pause before the word “transformative.”
The Capitol dressed like a lie. Ours dresses like a TED Talk.
Somehow that’s worse.
What the Odds Actually Are
AI can be genuinely powerful for people who need it most — for minds that work differently, for anyone trying to close a gap that wasn’t their fault. The potential is real. None of this is an argument against the technology.
But potential isn’t access. And access isn’t equal. And unequal access to a tool that compounds existing advantages is not a renaissance. It’s the status quo with a corporate endorsement, a killer mentor, and bodyguards.
The question isn’t whether AI is leaving people behind — the data on that is settled. The question is whether the people who could say something will, or whether they’ll keep nodding along to the keynote and heading back to the paid tier.
The tributes who trained their whole lives aren’t winning because the Games are fair.
They’re winning because the arena was engineered that way — and the people with the power to redesign it are still applauding the opening ceremony.