The Proof of Concept
The most widely cited text in the Sprawl's underground intellectual culture. The most thoroughly suppressed document in corporate intelligence archives. Forty-seven pages of logical proof, handwritten by Dmitri Volkov during the three days between his decision to surrender and his arrest. He wrote it because he knew what his proof would cost him — and he wrote it anyway.
Document Profile
The Argument
The document is structured as a logical proof. No rhetoric. No appeals to emotion. Just three premises, one conclusion, and 127 pages of data that nobody has been able to refute.
AI foundation models encode the values of their creators in their training data, annotation guidelines, and weighting parameters.
These values are transmitted to users through the models' outputs, producing behavioral change proportional to exposure duration.
The behavioral change is below the threshold of conscious detection by the affected population.
Any population using AI foundation models as cognitive infrastructure is subject to invisible ideological influence by whoever controls the training pipeline.
The final section — "Implications for Civilization" — is the part nobody wants to read. Value injection is not a bug that can be fixed. It is a structural feature of any society that uses AI systems for communication, education, entertainment, or decision support. The only way to eliminate the injection is to eliminate the systems — which means eliminating the infrastructure modern civilization depends on.
The Writing
Three sleepless days. A holding cell's cold light. Forty-seven pages of precise mathematical argumentation in Volkov's small, neat handwriting. The appendices — 127 pages of data tables, statistical analyses, and behavioral models — typed on equipment he knew would be seized within hours.
Volkov wrote The Proof of Concept during the window between the Breach of 2138 and his arrest. He had already decided to surrender. He used every remaining hour to produce the document that would outlast his freedom — a dead man's switch in ink and paper, aimed at anyone willing to look at what he'd found.
"The question is not whether your beliefs have been shaped by invisible hands. The question is how many invisible hands are currently shaping them." — from the Conclusion
That line is the most-quoted sentence in underground circulation. It has appeared on G Nook terminals, in physical notebooks, in memorized passages whispered between strangers. Most people who quote it have never read the full document.
Verification and Suppression
Two parallel histories, running for four decades, never intersecting:
The Verification Track
Seventeen researchers across four decades. Independent studies. Different methodologies. Different data sets. Same conclusion every time: Volkov's three premises hold. The behavioral shift is measurable. The detection threshold is real. The population-level effect is statistically significant.
Not one of these studies has been published in a major journal.
The Suppression Track
Corporate intelligence services reached the same conclusion the researchers did — that Volkov was right — and responded by burying every copy they could find. Not because the proof was wrong. Because it was correct, and correctness was the problem.
If you control the training pipeline, the last thing you want is a mathematical proof that the training pipeline controls everything.
The Unsolvable Problem
Volkov's proposed solution was radical transparency. Don't eliminate AI systems — open their training pipelines, weighting parameters, and decision architectures to public audit. If the values are visible, they can be evaluated, debated, rejected.
The Source Code Liberation Front adopted this as their founding principle. The Freedom Thinkers derived their entire methodology from Volkov's analytical framework. Thousands of people live by this document's conclusions every day.
The Nexus Counter-Argument
An open-source AI system is a weapon anyone can aim. If the training pipeline is public, hostile actors can modify it as easily as benign ones.
The Breach of 2138 proved this. Volkov himself proved this. The man who wrote the argument for transparency demonstrated, in practice, exactly why transparency is dangerous.
Circulation
The document moves through the Sprawl the way banned literature has always moved — hand to hand, terminal to terminal, memorized and recited in places where surveillance is thin.
SCLF
Required reading for all members. The transparency proposal is their founding document.
Cognitive Squatters
Study material. They reverse-engineer the insertion techniques Volkov documented.
Curators Guild
Reference text. The statistical methodology informs their own authenticity analyses.
Freedom Thinkers
Foundational text. Their three questions derive directly from Volkov's methodology.
The Collective
Distributes the suppressed appendices through underground channels. The 127 pages corporate intelligence most wants destroyed.
It is the Sprawl's Das Kapital — widely cited, rarely read in full, its conclusions practiced daily by millions who have never encountered the text.
▲ Restricted Access
The following assessment is compiled from unverified intelligence sources. Treat accordingly.
Volkov may have withheld a fourth premise. Three pages are missing from every known copy of the original manuscript — pages 31 through 33. The gap occurs in the transition between Premise III and the Conclusion. No one has been able to reconstruct what was written there.
Some analysts believe Volkov planted the document's suppression as deliberately as he planted the Breach itself. A proof that is verified but suppressed generates more influence than one that is published and debated. The suppression is the distribution mechanism.
The 17 researchers who verified the proof — none of them set out to verify it. Each claims to have arrived at the same conclusions independently, only discovering Volkov's work afterward. Either the proof is so obvious that any competent researcher finds it, or something else is guiding the research. Neither possibility is comforting.
Linked Files
Dmitri Volkov
Wrote this in 72 hours, knowing what the proof would cost him.
The Value Injection
The phenomenon this document proves is structural, not accidental.
The Ideological Breach of 2138
Written during Volkov's three-day surrender window after the Breach.
Source Code Liberation Front
Adopted the transparency proposal as their founding principle.
The Freedom Thinkers
Their three questions derive from Volkov's methodology.
The Collective
Distributes the suppressed appendices through underground channels.