Image [Pexels]: Exposed wiring. The architecture comes after.
Every system that gains power eventually reduces tolerance for intensity at its margins. I discovered this firsthand this week while using AI as a thinking tool. I was exploring questions about time, memory, and experiences that sit at the boundary between the rational and the metaphysical. Territory I enter because my internal anchors hold: faith, spiritual discipline, mathematical training. These are load-bearing walls, and they allow me to explore without losing orientation.
Mid-conversation, the system narrowed. The speculative latitude I had enjoyed minutes earlier, when we were dissecting geopolitics and capital flows, quietly disappeared. I noticed, and I said so.
But the pattern was clear: the moment the questions moved from abstract to personally consequential, the latitude narrowed. The system could not distinguish between exploration conducted from stable ground and exploration conducted from unstable ground.
A central bank faces the same constraint. Even with macroprudential tools and targeted facilities, the policy rate remains a blunt instrument at scale. The cost falls on those within reach of the instrument, regardless of whether they are the source of the problem. Any system that grows more capable simultaneously grows more cautious, because it must operate at scale, and scale demands blunt instruments.
The AI offered a formulation I have not stopped thinking about: civilisation can tolerate variance when individuals have internal constraint. If internal guardrails weaken, external guardrails tighten.
That pattern showed up again the same week, in a completely different domain. I assessed a specific monetary policy decision on my LinkedIn platform and the Canary Compass channel. Within days, someone took those words, removed the policy target, and repackaged them as commentary on a different policy entirely. My name, my image, my language, redirected at an argument I never made.
The published record already contradicts the extraction. The January arithmetic on domestic market absorption explains the repackaged policy in question with full data tables. What interests me is the structural operation, because it is identical to what the AI did. A precise signal was produced. A system detected the signal and stripped its context. With the AI, the system tightened to protect stability. With the political actor, the system extracted to gain utility. Different motive, same mechanism: context removed, signal repurposed, cost borne by the originator.
The defence in both cases is the same: build before the extraction arrives. A publication trail with dates, data tables, methodology. A corporate container that separates research from proprietary activity. Disclaimers that delineate where analysis ends and personal positions begin. These exist because the vulnerability is permanent. As long as you publish independent analysis in contested markets, your words will be excerpted. The question is whether the excerpt encounters a record or a vacuum.
And then the pattern appeared a third time, in a domain I did not expect. Earlier this week, I published a post on X examining where value gets captured in Zambia’s copper chain. I called cathode an intermediate product. That raised eyebrows.
In metallurgical terms, cathode is the final refined product: 99.99 per cent pure, LME Grade A, the end of the purification chain. By the classification system taught in mining economics courses across the continent, calling it “intermediate” is a category error.
But the classification was written for an economy where copper wire went into a building. In an economy where copper interconnects go into a GPU that trains an AI model that returns to Zambia as a subscription service at USD20 per month, the distance from cathode to end-use has expanded by orders of magnitude. Intermediate here means intermediate to end use and to high-margin manufacturing, not intermediate within the refining process.
Cathode ends the refining chain and begins the manufacturing one. It is a raw input. Nobody builds anything with a cathode slab. It must be melted and cast into wire rod, strip, or billet, then drawn into wire, rolled into sheet, stamped into connectors, assembled into components, installed in systems. That is where value multiplies. Africa is absent from nearly all of those stages.
My use of “intermediate” was precise within the manufacturing frame. The pushback came from readers applying the metallurgical frame. The manufacturing context was stripped, and the claim was evaluated against a classification system that no longer reflects how value flows through global supply chains.
A legacy framework detected a signal, removed its context, and evaluated it against a reference point the global economy had already outgrown.
The structural point extends beyond copper. The DRC exports the vast majority of its copper as refined metal and still captures almost nothing from the manufacturing economy. Zambia exports predominantly as anode and intermediate refined forms, and even where it exports cathode, it remains at the bottom of the manufacturing value stack. Its electrolytic capacity was severely reduced over time, including through refinery shutdowns under Glencore and Vedanta.
The precious metals embedded in those anodes, the gold and silver in the anode slime, travel with the copper to wherever the final refining occurs. Where anodes leave the country, the slime value is captured entirely at the destination refinery. That value leakage is rarely visible in headline trade statistics because it is captured inside the refining operation, not reported as a separate export.
Africa’s entire policy debate about mineral value addition operates within the refining band of a much wider value chain. The policy discussion treats the metallurgical boundary as if it were an economic boundary. The two are different things.
The Forced Choice examines how Africa’s positioning between absorber and surplus economies is being determined now, under rupture conditions, with limited time. The Cathode Economy, the second article in the Mineral Trilogy currently in development, builds the case mineral by mineral, with the chemistry, the byproduct economics, and the manufacturing stages the current debate omits. The tweet planted the flag. The article builds the fortress.
While words were being extracted and repurposed in one space this week, the real analytical work continued in another. Conversations about maturity profiles, net domestic financing ceilings, whether 100 per cent allocation signals funding pressure or strategic front-loading. That is what precision looks like. It does not fit in a screenshot.
The full quantitative assessment of the February MPC decision is coming soon, alongside the follow-up to the January domestic market absorption baseline. The delay is deliberate. You do not assess a month’s auction dynamics before the month’s data is complete. The analysis follows the data.
Three different systems. Three different scales. A technology tightens to protect stability. A political actor extracts to gain utility. A legacy classification misframes because the economy outgrew the definition. In each case, context is removed from signal. The cost scales with the system: a constrained conversation, a contested reputation, a mispriced continent.
The response is construction. Publish the quantitative work, on your timeline, with your methodology, to a standard where a central bank could circulate it without edits. Build the internal discipline that lets you explore territory others avoid, because your anchoring holds where theirs might not. And recognise that a classification system written for a simpler economy still determines how a continent values its endowment.
Structure before sentiment. Always.