Override Is Not Disruption. It’s Design.
Override isn’t a fix. It’s design. Here’s why women must write the memory layer of AI and build parallel infrastructure that remembers us.
Last week, I wrote about infrastructure as the foundation of daily life—roads and commodes, childcare and broadband, the quiet structures that determine whether a society functions. That essay laid the ground floor for September Infrastructure Month.
This week, we climb a level higher.
If infrastructure is the foundation, override is the command. It’s not disruption for its own sake. It’s design. A deliberate choice to redirect how systems are built, remembered, and carried forward.
What Override Means
I had the privilege of serving as keynote speaker at the System Override event last week. It was an extraordinary gathering hosted by Anne Murphy, Founder of She Leads AI. Women walked away with clarity, purpose, and a sense of direction for the year ahead.
Words have power, and override is one of the strongest we have in technology. It halts everything in motion. It resets the system. It is the energy women are carrying out of 2025.
When I said override on stage, I wasn’t talking about disruption.
Disruption is collateral damage. It happens when something shatters, whether we’re ready or not. Override is different. It’s intentional. A command, not an accident.
Override means: I see the defaults. I see the system. I refuse to run on them.
It isn’t a patch. It isn’t a fix. It’s design. A choice to redirect energy, attention, and memory into something that carries us forward instead of grinding us down.
That is what women are doing right now inside AI…not waiting for permission, not playing catch-up. Writing new commands into the system itself. Override allows women to disengage from extractive systems and instead build parallel infrastructure, alternatives that are designed to serve, not consume. Infrastructure that sits beside the crumbling institutions and replaces them with something designed to serve us.
Infrastructure Is Memory
People hear infrastructure and think bridges, the power grid, and water lines. Steel and concrete. Things that hold up daily life.
But infrastructure has always been more than roads and pipes. It determines who survives in a crisis, who has access to opportunity, and ultimately, who gets remembered.
In the industrial era, infrastructure was physical. In the digital era, it became networks and broadband. And now, in the AI era, infrastructure is shifting again into memory.
AI isn’t just code. It is memory; trained on information that spans all of human knowing. A growing filing cabinet, built by design. The men who built it decided what gets stored, what gets found, and what gets to grow…each choice weighted by their own lived experience.
That means AI isn’t neutral. It never was. We aren’t building intelligence, we’re building memory. And memory is political. Left unchallenged, it will repeat history’s habit of shrinking women into footnotes or erasing us altogether.
The Three Layers To Design
To override the defaults, we have to see the layers clearly:
Data Layers
Once, your knowledge belonged to you. Now, lived experience is scraped into training sets without your consent. Ask: Whose stories get archived, and whose get lost?
Practical example: A solopreneur documenting her workflows in ChatGPT creates a private knowledge base, one that centers her expertise instead of leaving it buried in someone else’s system.
Discovery Systems
Search has never been neutral. It has always privileged who paid to be seen. AI inherits this bias, but amplifies it.
Practical example: Publishing on Substack with SEO ensures your words can be found in search directly, not filtered by someone else’s algorithm.
Business Frameworks
Survival without systems always costs something. Health, time, or memory.
Practical example: A simple automation—calendar + intake form + email draft—frees a woman from admin overload and keeps her business resilient when she steps away.
If we don’t design these layers ourselves, they’ll be built without us. And when the system fails, history will do what it always does to women: forget.
Inheritance Over Output
Gen X women know survival by willpower better than anyone. We patched systems with grit and silence. We carried competence like a second skin. But survival without infrastructure is not enough.
What matters now is what we leave behind for generations to come. Not just what we produce in the moment, but what endures when we are gone.
Inheritance means building systems that carry our names. Artifacts: a process, framework, or piece of writing. Digital traces that don’t disappear when we pause to rest. Frameworks that remember us in full color.
This is why we are right on time. Our silence trained us to see the fracture. Our survival trained us to improvise. Now we can design with permanence. Not disruption. Override.
“We are not building intelligence. We are building memory.”
💻 Desk Activity
Write one sentence you want a future daughter, collaborator, or stranger to find when they search your name.
List three artifacts you will publish this month that carry that sentence forward.
Q&A: Override and AI Infrastructure
Q: What does “override” mean in AI infrastructure?
A: Override is not disruption. It’s a deliberate design choice—rejecting default systems and building new commands that carry forward women’s knowledge and experience.
Q: Why is AI infrastructure about memory?
A: AI doesn’t just process information; it decides what gets stored, found, and grown. Making it less about intelligence and more about collective memory. AI systems shape what gets remembered and what doesn’t.
Q: What are the three layers of AI infrastructure?
A: Data layers (whose knowledge is archived), discovery systems (who gets found), and business frameworks (who has systems resilient enough to endure).
Q: Why are Gen X women central to this work?
A: Gen X women have lived survival without infrastructure. Their ability to improvise and endure makes them uniquely prepared to design systems that prioritize inheritance over output.
Q: What is parallel infrastructure?
A: Parallel infrastructure means building systems beside the broken ones—resilient alternatives that don’t depend on old structures designed for extraction, but instead center equity, memory, and permanence.
Hi, I’m Sundee. I write at the edge where Gen X women and the world collide.
Sometimes it’s scripted. Sometimes it’s a wild tangent. But every word, every build, every rebellion points to the same thing—claiming a life they told us we couldn’t have.
On Time. On Purpose. On My Own Terms.