The Equation Was Never Neutral
A dispatch from the margins of math and memory.
CO₂ = P × S × E × C
A billionaire stood on a stage.
Polished. Applauded.
And spoke of people as variables.
“If we do a really great job on new vaccines…”
he said,
“we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
He meant population growth.
But he didn’t say it.
He said “lower that.”
As if breath were a burden.
As if existence were a glitch in his equation.
And the room laughed.
Not because it was funny.
But because wealth makes cruelty sound like strategy.
He wasn’t talking about genocide.
But he wasn’t talking to us either.
Not to the ones whose bodies have been tested on,
sterilized,
erased,
redacted from history and policy.
When someone that rich speaks that cold,
it’s not just tone.
It’s power.
It’s the comfort of knowing you’ll never be the one
whose breath is considered optional.
Vaccines save lives.
But language shapes perception.
And perception shapes policy.
And policy has always had a body count.
So we archive the quote.
We archive the silence.
We archive the ache of hearing our lives
reduced to a decimal.
This dispatch is not a conspiracy.
It’s a reckoning.
A reminder that even math can be violent
when spoken without care.
We are not variables.
We are not burdens.
We are not the part of the equation
that needs to be reduced.
This is encrypted breath.
This is chosen truth.
This is the archive of the unheard.
The billionaire was Bill Gates. The stage was TED. The year was 2010.