Candles to Cloud Labs

by Nato Riley

You’re about to read the story of how light shaped work — and how intelligence will shape the future of creation.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by data or burned out by knowledge work, this is your invitation to train your own AI apprentice.

Read to the end for a free dRAG Pack preview and the Bronze Twin builder’s deal.

The Hidden Burnout of the Modern Scholar

The first real desk jobs began thanks to the invention of the candle. I was thinking about this the other day when someone said, "We just weren't built to sit at desks all day long."

Meanwhile, I sit and stare longingly out the window while glued to my chair, sitting in front of glowing monitors filled with endless lines of code.

Suddenly it hit me. While I agree that human beings weren't meant to sit at desks all day, this tells us a very specific story across human history about the power of information and access to modern innovation.

If we go even further back, before desk jobs, the discovery of fire unlocked humanity's ability to create things like cave paintings in pitch-black caves.

Clearly, sitting on the floor and painting on walls was not efficient enough to continue being how we work to this very day. Even though we’re no longer painting caves, the desk job itself hasn’t evolved much since the innovation of the candle—and here’s why.

The Data Flood We’re Drowning In

Since the invention of the candle, the idea of sitting at desks for long hours, long days, and long nights is nothing new. However, as our light sources became brighter, we started creating new power sources. First, lanterns allowed light to remain available for much longer. Fast-forward to the 20th century, and the invention of the light bulb was the beginning of something most people have never considered.

Now that we no longer have to worry about candles burning out or oil running dry, there's not much stopping us from working almost 24/7. The creation of light singlehandedly marked the beginning of a new information era.

The Hidden Catastrophe of Cognitive Load

The biggest danger of the desk job isn't what most might think. Yes, sitting at a desk all day long is absolutely terrible for your health. But the hidden danger is the taxes you pay in  the form of cognitive load.

What is cognitive load?

Imagine this... When someone gets off of a work shift working at a physical job, whether that's hauling things around at a warehouse or being on your feet waiting tables all day long, it's obvious to get a sense of just how busy these types of workers are just by looking at how much they're constantly doing.

The challenge with intellectual work is that the brain still works like a muscle, and even burns calories, in some cases more than the calories burned working in a warehouse. This immense cognitive pressure is referred to as cognitive load. 

You know you've experienced cognitive load when you've focused on something for so long, that at some point, no matter what you do, you can no longer force yourself to focus any longer. 

This is one of the number one challenges and impacts on health, including mental health, for intellectual workers, and for those who don't know much about the dangers of cognitive load, it would be well worth your time to do deep research about the dangers of cognitive load.

From Candlelight to Quantum

Even though light bulbs were a huge leap ahead of flame-based lighting, the personal computer and the backlit television created new possibilities for absorbing massive amounts of information around the clock.

The backlit screen was expensive at first, and books still required lamps. Since computers were originally quite slow, this was still the most information human beings had ever consumed. Without new, more effective forms of lighting, we couldn’t take in as much information. With each innovation, data became more available—until everything became a backlit computer screen. Most people in developed civilizations now have a tiny computer in their pocket called a smartphone.

Not only do we have light everywhere, we now have access to backlit information 24/7. We don’t even need a booklight to read all night. The world has made information so available that we’ve gone from scarcity to overabundance. The most interesting part is that we still rely on fire to light everything in our lives.

The New Skill

This brings me to my challenge. My career has brought me to mostly working with what are called dark-site technologies. These are unique because they’re so sensitive that even connecting them to the internet poses extreme risks.

Imagine what it takes for a whole city to have light 24/7—cellular towers, chargeable pocket devices, constant power. What does it really take to light the world?

A power grid is basically a giant oil lantern that lets an entire city burn continuously. A lot of my work centers around solving how to ensure that power runs without interruption.

There are many reasons for power outages, and everyone feels it the moment the world goes silent and dark. If the power stays out long enough, food goes bad, communication breaks, and figuring out what’s happening around you becomes impossible.

• Someone made a mistake.
• A protocol might have been missed.
• Regulations might have been misunderstood.
• Worst case, an adversary attacked your city at its heart.

When we are cut off from information, we go blind. In the 21st century, intelligence is your eyes. Intelligence is the modern-day oil.

The dRAG Pack

Whether you’re trying to get information across the world in an online environment or working in heavily regulated industries like I do, Cloud Underground has evolved into more of an agency. We are releasing our very first intelligence feed—an evolution of our long history training members of the DevSecOps Dojo and building the Underground Nexus. After supporting customers in over 34 countries and receiving more than 10,000 downloads of our open-source sovereign technology, we finally discovered why people come to us.

When you don’t know what to do, or where to go, you find the people with the answers. When you own the agency that houses oceans of intelligence, you become the people who have the answers.

The real reason intelligence matters is simple: better intelligence improves decision-making. When you’re managing hundreds of millions in assets, you can’t risk too many poor decisions. Competitors with better intelligence will root you out of the market.

This brings us back to the power grid. To keep power flowing, we must collect, manage, and analyze as much intelligence as possible, always with the goal of making better decisions more frequently.

What do I mean by intelligence? We started organizing what are called RAG Packs. RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. This is the art of having a computer folder that an AI can read files from.

To make intelligence understandable, data has become so dense that ignoring the technologies available to us leaves us sitting in the dark.

If you're curious about what types of data would be stored in a RAG folder, here is an example of some RAG that can be used to help your website get more traffic.

While this file might look intimidating, the capabilities presented by this one file are significant. In my line of work, this single file is what we call an intelligence artifact. When you configure a folder filled with intelligence artifacts, you create an intelligence RAG Pack.

The next generation of creators won’t wait for tools—they’ll build their own.

Why Builders Win

Thanks to the power of intelligence artifacts, technologies like ChatGPT can now function similarly to AWS as a backend.

Instead of hiring an entire AWS-scale workforce to manage our scaling infrastructure, we asked: “What if we collected intelligence that made our technology so capable we didn’t need hundreds of engineers?” Using the right intelligence, we can create our dream sovereign cloud.

What we’ve become capable of delivering at enterprise scale isn’t about replacing workers but amplifying ourselves through technology. In the 21st century, someone with raw skill and no money can achieve what used to require millions in funding.

As builders grow more advanced, they need less budget to reach greater scale. Those with only money need dramatically more of it to achieve what skilled builders can do themselves. Builders are the ones who get paid by those without the skills—to accomplish what they could never do alone.

Ready to Train Your Own Twin?

The dRAG Pack is your first apprentice—your starter kit for understanding intelligence. It’s built for creators, innovators, and anyone who’s ready to stop consuming information and start building with it.

If you’re serious about scaling your capabilities, upgrade to the Bronze Twin. It’s your personal AI mentor, powered by our Amber RAG intelligence layer. Whether you’re a developer, founder, or lifelong learner, the Bronze Twin helps you automate the boring things and build sovereign systems faster.

Don’t wait for someone else to create your future—build it. Turn your intelligence into power, and power into freedom.

Enrollment for the holiday builder’s bundle closes December 22nd. Build your lab, claim your twin, and enter 2026 ahead of the curve.