The Power of Not Fitting In: Why Messy Careers Build Better Solutions

"AI systems are being deployed in vulnerable communities by actors with minimal accountability. Digital infrastructure is reshaping power in ways governance frameworks can't capture. The gap between where technology gets developed and where its consequences land keeps widening".

If you're reading this feeling professionally illegible—too technical for policy work, too political for technical roles, too critical for implementation, too practical for research—you might be positioned to do something valuable.

The sector's real challenges sit in the spaces between professional specializations.

"Truth is a matter of who you're speaking to and who's financing what."

A journalist in Bangui, Central African Republic, said this during a briefing where I was presenting counter-disinformation strategies. I had arrived with frameworks developed in Brussels—sophisticated tools for detecting false information and building institutional resilience.

He wasn't saying truth doesn't exist. He was pointing out something I'd missed: communities in conflict don't distrust information because they can't spot lies. They distrust it because they've learned that whoever controls the money and institutions also controls what counts as "truth." I was treating disinformation as a technical problem while ignoring that information itself is a tool of power.

This hit differently than typical feedback. It wasn't "your approach needs cultural adaptation"—it was "your entire framing misses how power actually works here."