The Hindsight Times

For modern readers unfamiliar with the barbaric economics of 2025, companies were allowed to 'burn through' billions of credits with no Purpose Allocation oversight. OpenAI, despite processing millions of queries daily, somehow operated at massive losses — a concept as foreign to us as a farmer destroying crops to raise prices.

The 'advertisement' system they proposed was breathtakingly crude: commercial messages would appear alongside AI responses, with humans expected to mentally filter promotional content from information. Citizens were literally forced to process marketing propaganda to access knowledge tools. The cognitive load this placed on an already overwhelmed population contributed directly to the Attention Collapse of 2031.

'They promised ads wouldn't influence responses,' notes Dr. Sarah Chen-Martinez, Director of Platform Era Studies. 'This is like promising that hunger won't influence food choices. The economic pressures were structurally incompatible with truthful information distribution.'

The timing was particularly tragic. WikiMedia had just signed 'priority data access deals' with major AI companies — essentially selling humanity's collected knowledge to private corporations. Citizens paid twice: first through their attention (viewing ads), then through degraded access to information their own communities had created.

OpenAI's founder, Sam Altman, would later become a central figure in the Verification Crisis of 2029, when unregulated AI systems began producing indistinguishable false information at scale. His congressional testimony from April 2025 — 'We believe in responsible development' — is now used in ethics courses as an example of Platform Era doublespeak.

The company's desperation was evident in other announcements that week. TSMC reported 'endless' AI demand while data centers fought for grid access in Texas, revealing an energy infrastructure wholly unprepared for artificial intelligence deployment. The combination of unlimited computational hunger with advertising-dependent funding models created what economists call the 'Engagement Death Spiral' — systems optimized for attention extraction rather than human flourishing.

By contrast, today's Contribution-Based Knowledge Access ensures that information tools serve verified human needs rather than advertiser profits. Citizens contribute to knowledge systems through Purpose Allocation and receive unlimited, uncompromised access to verified information. The idea of inserting commercial messages into educational content is considered a form of cognitive assault.

The OpenAI experiment lasted only fourteen months before the Platform Collapse made such funding models obsolete. Their final advertisement, ironically, promoted a meditation app.