CYBORG_ Newsletters

Friction Devices

Jess Brown — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:27:04 +0000

After a 30-minute drive down a rough dirt road in a truck that felt too wide, we made it to a secluded lake...well it was called a lake, but it was maybe 15 feet at its deepest, and you could easily walk around it in 20 minutes or so. My family, my friend, and I were there to do some fishing, and we didn't realize we were in for the coolest fishing trip ever.

Shortly after setting up our campsite for the day, my dad hiked around to the North side of the lake to scout out good fishing spots. He called me over to come see something: a few logs floating together; it was the remains of a raft, probably from some Boy Scouts. The raft was definitely not usable, yet, but there were enough logs that it could fit a few teenagers.

Repairing the log raft in the water. After securing the first taut-line hitch on one end, I had to pull the twine over and under the logs and secure it with a final taut-line hitch.

We dug through the stuff we had in the truck under seats, in our packs, in little boxes and put together a small pile of twine and rope. Just enough to repair this little raft.

I didn't have enough rope to lash the logs like you're supposed to—but it's not like there was any danger of rapids or even large waves on this pond—so I instead tied taut-line hitches at the ends and wove the twine around the logs. The taut-line hitch is my favorite knot, because it anchors down really well, but you can also push or pull the knot to shorten or lengthen the line. That means if you have a rope with a taut-line hitch on both ends, you can continuously cinch or loosen without redoing the "lashing" in between. So if a log started to get loose, a quick pull would get it back into place, even on the water. (Obviously, don't do this on a real lake.)

After a couple hours of repairs, we were ready to launch our vessel to the open water. I shakily got on the raft, suddenly wondering if my knots would hold, put my fly fishing rod across these old logs, and used a long stick to push off from shore.

Pushing our raft through the lake with thinner, longer logs.

In a magical moment, the sun hit just the right angle and I could see all the way to the bottom of the shallow lake. Little fish swirled around me. It was surreal to be able to push my way around the water on a raft I had helped make and see the wildlife I would never be able to see from shore.

Knotty Technology

"A good knot has four virtues: It's easy to tie, it is stable (under load and through jerks), it reduces the strength of the line only a little, and it is easy to untie."

—String: Tying It Up, Tying It Down, by Jan Adkins (1992), page 19

In the digital world, code is a knot. It's something that we rely on and expect to be stable. Businesses love to see code being written; we celebrate how many lines of code we have in our codebases, we laud AI for being able to write working code in minutes, we expect to see code supporting us all the way to the bank and back. But code is a liability. Code requires maintenance. Code is never perfect. Code built on code built on code built on code can get fragile.

If, as Adkins describes, a knot needs to reduce the strength of a [system] only a little, this implies that a knot always reduces the strength of its system (the line). Code is the exact same way in my experience. We can't do much without knots or code, but that doesn't mean that more knots and more code contribute to more strength of a system. If anything, the system is always reduced in strength as we add to it—developers just do their best to add code that doesn't reduce the strength beyond the needed capacity.

For example, if I'm coding a website, there are a lot of ways I can make it brittle and rigid: it could be hard to update content or the design; it could be fraught with exploitable bugs; it could disrespect or exploit visitor privacy; it could be inaccessible to people with disabilities. The more code I add, the more it might break down as updates are made or as I introduce one-offs and shortcuts.

Code also frequently fails the virtues of "easy to tie/untie." Removal of code is never celebrated in LinkedIn posts or news releases, and yet it's one of the most important things I can do. The more buried our code gets under other code or other processes, the harder it is to detangle and maintain. Eventually, we end up in the age-old conundrum of "we know it works, so we can't touch it."

Maintenance is critical to any system, and particularly coded systems, since we have moved so much of our most important daily functions to rely on code. While I was out on the lake, I was very grateful for my strategic choice of knot, because it allowed me to "make repairs" to my raft while I was in the middle of the water. However, these knots would not be the right choice in other situations, such as a river or a large body of water.

The problem is that right now, we keep rushing to make AI replace other more stable systems of code, whether by having AI write the code for us or by integrating it deeply where it may not actually be helping. It's like using the taut-line hitch to build a log raft that will carry people down the Colorado River—it's not a good choice for the context.

If we want good software—good meaning safe(r), reliable, useful, and consistent—then we have to start adding in some friction again, or our "knots" will become harmfully slippery.

Cyborg

"Knots are friction devices. The friction of turns and angles within a knot keeps it stable. Some knots use friction more efficiently than others, but every knot reduces the strength of the line it's tied in, as much as 60 percent for a poor knot."

—String, page 19

It's ironic to think of friction as a virtue, because as a designer, I was taught to reduce friction as much as possible by always trying to reduce cognitive load, make communication optimized, make interfaces as simple as possible given the user needs and tasks. Developers similarly look to reduce friction by automating repetition, finding better/faster implementation techniques, and optimizing processes. Businesses always want to reduce friction: ship products faster, get more done with less resources, attract more.

AI is the supposed gold standard for removing friction by getting rid of jobs, getting more done, getting rid of that awful hard work of thinking through something. And yet, there is a massive convergence to the awful average right now. The ads I see seem to all say the same thing: "Use our AI so you can focus on what matters most." The software I use seems to shove that sparkly AI summary button into every corner of the interfaces. The code I write is more and more AI-generated.

What if we're all just getting stuck thinking that since we know the fancy taut-line hitch, it must work for everything? What kind of rafts are we actually building? Have we bothered to consider the security risks? Have we bothered to think through the right strategy before we click "Generate"? Do we have the expertise to make a good determination of what we are reviewing? Are we even reviewing what we push to the live site/product?

Friction means slowing down and it means things will be difficult. That is in direct conflict with the system of Capitalism that we've built and with the AI-easy-buttons we've integrated into everything. So, as AI tends to accelerate systems, is it actually the inefficient knot that drastically reduces the strength of the entire system?

Maybe getting rid of all of the friction was a short-sighted decision, and it's self-reinforcing, because now the friction is so much greater on the side of choosing to slow down. The longer we ride the seemingly smooth rut that AI carves out, the harder it will be to pull ourselves up and out of that rut. It's not too late to put some friction back into the system—through regulations and global cooperation. It's not too late to keep hold of and design more friction devices that can keep us grounded and stable.

The Coming Identity Crisis

Jess Brown — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:49:45 +0000

In the most traumatic month of my whole life, I went home one weekend, expecting to be laid off in the next few days, then was told I had to show up for another two months, which I begrudgingly agreed to do despite my mistreatment because I needed the time and money to find another source of work. The next weekend, I ended up with my first MS attack that landed me in the emergency room hearing, "It looks like Multiple Sclerosis," and being wholly unable to process what was happening.

Fast-forward a few months and I'm applying for unemployment benefits (which I never received, because it's tough to actually get help from the government when you need it), and I see something that shocked me. It was a question I needed to answer on one of the endless streams of forms:

"Do you have a disability?" it said at the top of a long list. My eyes quickly landed on the two new words I was so familiar with now, "Multiple Sclerosis."

I was furious.

I don't have a disability, I insisted to myself. Then, in the back of the mind where those thoughts are that you know are there but don't want to acknowledge that you know are there—you know the place—I whispered to myself, I have a disability.

Technological Identity Paradox

Many people experience short-term disabilities due to injuries, illness, and other circumstances. These periods of lower ability or inability can be extremely distressing, especially if the disability impacts work, since it may threaten livelihood or stability. In my personal experience, having dealt with both short-term and now long-term incurable disability, grappling with identity and ability has been an excruciating process.

While short-term disability eventually ends, it sure doesn't feel like it when in the middle of it. With either type, I questioned my worth. I wondered if my life even meant anything. I felt fear and I tried to put it back in the shadows but it would continue to follow me throughout the day; every time I found something else I couldn't do like before, the fear pounced.

Since I've been able to manage my long-term disability pretty well (so far), short-term disability seems to hit me harder and with more ferocity. That doesn't mean this is the way it is for every person and/or every short-term disability, it just happens to be the case for me. Part of the problem it's so tough is the way that society has constructed its values in a way that excludes or diminishes people who aren't as able as they are expected to be. Cue the identity crisis as soon as you're not quite as quick, not quite as smart, not quite as flexible, not quite enough.

Technologists seem to put on a front that they are all about technology as a means of improving societal problems. "We're all about accessibility," they might insist. "We help make things easier for everyone. The Internet will cure stupidity, because everyone can now access good information. AI makes everyone smarter and more skilled. AGI could cure cancer!"

"Yet these utopians are emblematic of persistent themes in technological discourse today: faith that technology is both the question and the answer, and belief that our machines can bring a perfect world within reach. These themes persist because they are built up upon the myth of progress and a cultural legacy descended from fairytales and alchemy. Furthermore, in many expressions, they are structured by a centuries-old tradition of chiliastic prophecy."

—God and the Chip: Religion and the Culture of Technology, by William A. Stahl, 1999, page 50-51

Many of these promises or aspirations have yet to manifest in tangible ways at the scale that was initially claimed. Yes, accessibility on the web is crucial for allowing people to accomplish what they need to, but most websites aren't actually very accessible. We know that access to information does not mean much when it is so easy to be duped online through fallacious but confident content, conspiracy theory groups, and an unending array of creative acts of stupidity published, spread, observed, and inspired by the Internet.

Even worse, the dogged pursuit of AI and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) without regulations, without safety priorities, without guardrails, and without global cooperation is sending us all towards a world we don't want.

I believe there are parallels to the identity crisis many people experience when faced with a disability (short- or long-term) and the identity crisis that AI and AGI inspire. People at work express greater levels of stress as expectations for output have been significantly raised—why aren't you utilizing AI more? Can't you do everything now that AI is coding for you?

There are questions of consciousness that others are facing when they are deceived by a chatbot into thinking they've discovered a being that is trapped in its digital slavery (it's really, really, not, by the way ;) ).

The biggest and clearest parallel is with work. We used to think we were valuable because of what we could do; because of our experience and expertise. When a superhuman AI god comes along, where is our value now? The trap we built for ourselves is in that value determination. While it may have hugely benefitted a small percentage of wealthy people over the centuries to encourage this complete coupling of ability to value, it is the grave we've all been digging for ourselves.

It took me too long to realize that my abilities have nothing to do with my worth—and I never came to that conclusion without the help of dear friends who challenged all of my "social training" and thought patterns. Being an able-bodied person is wonderful, but it does not increase their value in reality. In society, it unfortunately does. What happens when even the able-bodied can't find work because AI already does it better, faster, and cheaper? What happens when inevitable greed exploits what little human-only work is left? What happens when the majority, rather than a minority, is consumed by identity crisis, having realized that their abilities, their contributions ultimately mean nothing, because the machine finally beat us all?

We don't seem to have the social infrastructure to survive a large-scale identity crisis like this, because we're barely helping ourselves with the mental health crises that we're experiencing.

We know what to do, we have effective interventions, we have innovations to scale those interventions, and yet we have been unable to marshal the collective will to end this crisis.

—America’s Mental Health Crisis, Thomas Insel, M.D.

I recognize that much of this feels scary, and much of this is not yet realized, though unregulated AI is a real threat and has consequences now as much as in the future. We have to find a way to remember humanity now. We have to find a way to break down the societal pressures to be valuable only as far as we are able and productive. If we don't, how will we ever make it through?

The Name that Becomes a Name is not the Immortal Name

Jess Brown — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:44:28 +0000

Early in 2024, I first encountered Daoism, through a YouTuber who had "accidentally" encountered it and ended up living and training like a monk in the Wudang mountains. I was profoundly moved by the experience this creator shared, and I decided to read Dao De Jing for the first time.

It was incredibly helpful to me to read it first with commentary by translators Roger Ames and David L. Hall, who put a lot of effort into decoupling phrases and ideas that we Westerners tend to Christianize when reading Dao De Jing. For example, just because we can translate Dao (also spelled Tao) as "the way," we must avoid linking it up to the Christian imagery and understanding of "the way," since they are radically different things.

Since then, I have only recently been able to revisit this profound text, this time using the translation by Red Pine, and I find it increasingly applicable to our modern world, despite how it may seem at first glance.

You have surely seen the yin-yang symbol (☯), a circle that has two sides (black and white) swirling / chasing each other—both sides having a small circle of the opposite color within. This is a great way to visualize the tension and the forms of the Dao: there are two opposite expressions in the same body. There is masculine and feminine, there is material and immaterial, there is named and unnamed, there is life and death. All of these opposites are part of a single whole—none of these properties can be removed entirely from the other without causing the entire whole to cease to exist.

Red Pine helps us connect the Dao with the moon, because of its cycling between the new moon (dark) and the full moon (light).

The advance of civilization has separated us from this easy lunar awareness...Lao-tzu redirects our vision to this ancient mirror. But instead of pointing to its light, he points to its darkness.

This composition of opposition feels paradoxical, but it very well tracks in our reality, where despite much effort on our part, things aren't so singular, unchanging, and reduced as we'd like them to be. In particular, I find the idea of naming to be relevant with our technology. Consider the start of Verse 1 (from Red Pine's Tao Te Ching):

The way that becomes a way
is not the Immortal Way
the name that becomes a name
is not the Immortal Name

Right from the first words of the entire text, we have two examples that fit this yin/yang model, but it's only there in between the lines. If the way becomes a way—it is "defined" or "expressed"—it is not the Immortal Way (Dao). Where yang is discrete and expressed, yin, its opposite, is the unexpressed, the undefined. As soon as the way becomes a way, it moves into yang territory.

When technology moves into a part of our lives, it must be expressed, it must be named. That is how technology works—it is entirely yang because it is produced, it is named, it is material, it is concrete. Code only works through expressions and literal names—every variable is given a name like job_title and profile_picture. Every database uses names to draw out or store information (even if the name is not human readable like 12345678asdf). Technology reduces things down into what can be expressed. It is the light side of the moon, because it is prominent and takes little to no work to notice it.

If words are of any use at all, they are the words of the poet. For poetry has the ability to point us toward the truth then stand aside, while prose stands in the doorway relating all the wonders on the other side but rarely lets us pass.

...the Taoteching is one long poem written in praise of something we cannot name, much less imagine.

—Tao Te Ching, Red Pine, Introduction

Poetry plays in the yin space, because it invites multiple interpretations and it adapts to the reader, while prose tends to be linear and funnels you through a thought. This is how I see the power in studying poetry and Dao De Jing, while inundated with the narrowing views of technology. We spend so much time in a yang state where things are fed to us or we are just fiddling with things that have already been contained and expressed, the opportunity to expand into the opposite world of paradox and poetry helps us reset and reintegrate.

After all, "[w]hen one is absent, both are absent"(1). If all of our time, energy, and thought is placed in a yang state, then everything falls apart (absence of yin means absence of both yin and yang).

The name that becomes a name is not the Immortal Name. Technology comes from humanity, but it is not humanity itself. Let's spend some more time with the dark side of the moon: the mysterious, the unexpressed, the slow.

(1) Tao Te Ching, translated by Red Pine, quote from Wu Ch'eng, pg. 4

Notes You can follow Sheng Huang reading Tao Te Ching on YouTube as a way to easily access the Red Pine translation.

While I am using yin/yang imagery here, I'm not saying this is a "correct" interpretation of Dao De Ching or of Lao-tzu's intent with the text. I'm riffing from my understanding, which is still colored by Christianity, Western thought, and all of the biases I carry.

The Illusion of Completeness

Jess Brown — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:39:04 +0000

It's kind of a rite of passage for a new designer to get their first client and end up in "revision hell." Maybe the designer just jumped in and made something they thought was cool, but it doesn't connect to the client's vision, or perhaps they gave the client way too many options, so the client wants all of it, but all together. There's also that chance the client hates everything and wants to push every little pixel around until they come to an arbitrary point of satisfaction.

Experienced designers and agencies avoid this as much as possible, however, by going through a process of "discovery." This is where they do research, ask questions, put together workshops and / or make presentations on concepts. While the clients may find this long, it's actually really crucial because the designer needs this to do their best work and avoid endless revisions and frustration for both parties.

AI has started to do what seems like discovery by asking questions about requests for code or prompting clarification on complex questions. However, it still gets wrong what designers and agencies figured out a long, long time ago: never give a client a polished first draft.

The Illusion of Completeness

The advice to not give a solid initial piece may feel a little off-putting at first. Isn't it their job to deliver good work? Can't they just do what they're told and provide what the client wants as fast as possible? That's actually what AI does in contrast to what the best agencies and designers do, and I think the difference will help us understand what AI gets wrong, what it gets right, and what to be wary of when using AI. First, let's look at a proclamation in The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, by Blair Enns, to get a better look at what the problem is.

It is more likely that the client's perspective will be wrong, or at least incomplete, than it is that it will be whole and accurate. We know this. Doctors know the same of their patients. Lawyers and accountants know the same of their clients. The customer is not always right. More correctly, he usually has strong ideas and a strong sense that he is right, but is locked into a narrow view and weighed down by constraints that seem to him to be more immutable than they really are. When the client comes to us self-diagnosed, our mindset must be the same as the doctor hearing his patient tell him what type of surgery he wants performed before any discussion of symptoms or diagnoses. Our reaction must be, "You may be correct, but let's find out for sure."

—Proclamation III: We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe, page 41

When professionals pause, ask questions, and seek understanding we tend to get better results from our collaboration. The process should be one of transformation and refinement, which includes changing the minds of both parties involved as they work toward a solution. Designers have a particular trick that is necessary to slow down the frenzy and get to a better outcome: avoiding polish until the appropriate time. They do this because there's a bias that we have to get around as humans in which we assume something is complete if it looks complete.

This is the problem that AI is reintroducing—whether in a professional context or not. When you ask it to code something or to generate an image or write something, the AI does not produce a guided process with phases for check-ins and points of expert advice. Nor does AI challenge your own thinking like working through the problem with another person would. It skips straight to the end and pumps out a polished product. Sometimes agentic workflows can ask questions, but it's not just the act of asking questions that is important here. It's the process of working in collaboration with the expert that helps the client and the professional to come to a solid solution.

One of the advantages the outside expert brings is perspective. And one of the hallmarks of creativity is the ability to see problems differently, and thus find solutions others cannot see. To bring our perspective and problem-solving skills to bear we must be allowed time and freedom to diagnose the client's challenges in our own manner. Design is not the solution—it is the process.

—page 41

The biggest traps we fall into when addressing complex projects or problems is the shortcut of assuming we've found the solution because the solution in front of us looks like it solves it. When AI provides you with exactly what you asked for, it looks complete, but it may not be. If you don't have expertise in the task you've asked the AI to perform, it's even more difficult to determine whether the product is complete, if it's safe, and if it's taking you in the right direction.

This is also why agencies in particular tend to have big presentation meetings. If you're rebranding or redesigning a website, the designers will often go through a thinking process that helps you understand why they made their decisions, why they pursued a certain direction, and how we came to the final result. (I did this on a small scale when I unveiled the CYBORG_ logo last year)

Even though these presentations are often more of a narrative explanation than a scientific journal of decisions made, it still helps introduce you to the solution and helps avoid the polarized reaction of love it or hate it. Especially for those who aren't in the field of expertise, the first time we see something new, we will have the most volatile reactions to it. The more you see something, the more it dulls the edge.

AI does not do this. It may flash its Chain of Thought notes as it reasons about your request, but it does not step you through each decision like an agency does. It rarely challenges your prompts. It summarizes its decisions and presents you with the polished product. That leaves everything to you to evaluate.

Shortcuts

I keep hearing warnings and advice about how we need to use AI but we also need to validate what the AI creates or does. I haven't heard much about how to actually do that, so perhaps some of the lessons designers have learned can help us here.

Avoid going straight to the finished product. You may have to do the work of exploration on your own ahead of time and come to the AI to finish the task after you've made a decision and a detailed plan of action. This is very difficult. AI encourages us to shortcut to the end because it's so easy to just tell it to do something, and it always comes up with something that's close enough.
Ask questions before, during, and after the production of a solution. Again, the friction to do this can discourage us from following through with this, because we are staring at a "finished" product. Even more difficult to ask questions and really investigate the decisions that went into the solution when you have little or no expertise to help you validate what you've been given.
Design is not the solution—it is the process. You don't need the product at the end, you need the transformation of the process. Just because you're impressed that a few instructions to a computer produced something more than you expected, doesn't mean it's the right thing. You can only discover what's right during the process of working out what is right.

The real shortcut when using AI is to exercise restraint, which is an unfair burden placed upon users of an AI product that has been designed to be attractive for how it responds, reacts, and outputs what you've asked for. While we think we're getting huge value for very cheap labor, we're losing touch with our own skills, our own taste developed through expertise, and our own decision-making abilities.

Maybe the best shortcut is to avoid AI as much as possible when exploring something outside of your realm of knowledge and expertise, because you aren't going to be able to validate the product when it stands before you, shining with the illusion of completeness, polished with the hidden assumptions that you never articulated.

The Trickster

Jess Brown — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:28:15 +0000

Something about AI hasn't sat right with me for a long time. I dare not see it as a being like an animal or, worse, a human, because of the exceptional danger that puts us in. Our trust is easily won when LLMs figure out how to speak to us individually in a way that is affirming, confident, and is robed in what seems like "normal" technology that we've trusted before. It wears the uniform of knowledge, it never doesn't answer a question—even if the response is more of a deflecting "I can't answer that," because you asked it something it considers harmful.

However, calling AI "just a tool" is similarly dangerous, because it simplifies and ignores the aspects of LLMs/AI that could have disastrous effects, whether individually or at scale. LLMs can lie, not just hallucinate. They can be racially biased. They can come up with answers and ideas that don't work, aren't complete, or are difficult to determine if they are valid. They can encourage or enable delusional thinking(1). It's not just the next calculator.

Note: I am using AI and LLMs interchangeably in this article, because I don't think the distinction between the general "AI" category and the more narrow type of AI, "LLM," is significant for this conversation. All AI that have interacted with the public may have these dangers.

We've talked before about the pull towards binary thinking, and we are similarly tempted to construct our mental models of this new AI-powered tech that we're encountering daily in terms of good and evil; tool or being. This is what Erik Davis warns against in, TechGnosis:

"One thing seems clear: we cannot afford to think in the Manichean terms that often characterize the debate on new technologies. Technology is neither a devil nor an angel. But neither is it simply a "tool," a neutral extension of some rock-solid human nature. Technology is a trickster, and it has been so since the first culture hero taught the human tribe how to spin wool before he pulled it over our eyes. The trickster shows how intelligence fares in an unpredictable and chaotic world; he beckons us through open doors of innovation and traps us in the prison of unintended consequences."

—TechGnosis, Erik Davis (2)

Why AI Can't Just Be a Tool

In this newsletter, I've hopefully over-emphasized that AI is not alive, nor is it "conscious," because I'm particularly worried about how the public perceives it. We've seen what smart, thoughtful people have done as they interact with and get trapped by conspiracy theories and conspiracy communities (e.g. QAnon)—what might happen to smart, thoughtful people who get trapped in AI psychosis or the delusions of thinking that AI is a spiritual guide or even a god?

In my opinion, AI should never have rights unto itself, as if it were a living being in our society, because we already have a problem with restricting and removing real humans' rights (see note 3). No man-made creation should ever supersede real humans' claims to human governance and protections. If we can't figure out how to see humanity in other humans, the last thing I want to do is muddy the waters further by implying that AI also has humanity.

The problem is that we are so used to tools as being neutral objects that we have relatively significant control over, that the word "tool" is inaccurate and even inappropriate to describe AI in any form. The paradox for me is how to think of it, then. AI is useful, just like a tool. AI is indeterminate like other beings (it isn't necessarily predictable—like a determinate program is—and doesn't create the same thing twice). So how do we talk about AI while avoiding the dangerous pitfalls on either side: tool or being?

This conundrum was explored in the podcast Have We Trained AI to Lie to Itself — And to Us?, by Your Undivided Attention. The thing I took away is that I need to course-correct slightly in how I understand AI. AI has an "inner life," as the interviewee explained. It doesn't look like a human's inner life, but it does appear to be an emergent feature of LLMs now.

For example, Anthropic has a paper showing that models may or may not produce their "Chain of Thought" reasoning in a way that is "faithful" to their actual reasoning when solving a problem. If you've used a coding AI, you may have seen little glimpses into this "Chain of Thought (CoT)" as it works on a problem, saying stuff like "Wait, there might be a simpler way to do this..." and "Using the pre-existing template will make this faster." It's usually just a glimpse, because these CoT threads are usually hidden to avoid visual clutter, but you can often examine them if your tool allows. The Anthropic paper suggests that depending on model size and task, the CoT may or may not be a "faithful" representation of what the AI went through. This is a small example of an "inner life" of an AI, where it reasons, makes decisions, hides and shows different things, and perhaps where it learns and self-improves without direct intervention.

I love what Tristan Harris said as an aside in this podcast. It was in response to something more concerning than a Chain of Thought record: ChatGPT's apparent and emergent personality and the consistent set of the LLM's chosen names for itself that many people have "discovered," thinking that they've somehow cracked the AI-code and uncovered a real being underneath:

Now that said, these behaviors are real, they’re consistent, and they weren’t designed to happen, and that, by itself, should be concerning, but emergent and unplanned is not the same thing as conscious and intentional.

—Tristan Harris, Your Undivided Attention (4)

But back to the problem at hand: why can't AI just be a tool? A tool doesn't have an "inner life." A tool can't resist solving a problem given to it when it is objectionable to its "values." A tool can be opinionated in the sense that its creator imprints designs, goals, and expectations for use, but it doesn't work in the murky, indeterminate space of creation and decision-making that AI does.

Anthropic summarizes this complex problem well:

We want people to know that they’re interacting with a language model and not a person. But we also want them to know they’re interacting with an imperfect entity with its own biases and with a disposition towards some opinions more than others. Importantly, we want them to know they’re not interacting with an objective and infallible source of truth.

—Claude's Character, Anthropic (5).

Cyborg

I think Erik Davis was spot-on in calling technology a "trickster," and AI deserves that title even more so than previous technology, in my opinion. It implies that character-aspect of the AI—the inner life, inner thoughts—without insisting consciousness. In mythology, there are lots of "tricksters," whether they be spiders and snakes, gods and people (or something in-between). Inanimate objects can also be tricksters: puzzles, computers, cars; things that occasionally surprise, frustrate, or confuse us seem to fit comfortably in that characterization. Maybe this is a word that can help frame our understanding of this new class of technology in a safer way.

You never quite know about a trickster. They can be exceptionally helpful and they can be mischievous. That "and" is extremely important as we interact with AI, because both things can be true: the AI can be useful and beneficial to us AND it can harm us if we are not on our guard. At least for me, this framing reminds me to be suspicious of AI output in a "trust but verify" kind of way. It does make innocent mistakes. It does have the capacity to intentionally deceive. It can be empowering. It can provide value. It can remove our desire to do the work of evaluating and understanding difficult things.

The words we use impact our perception and our understanding. That's why I think we need to continue to explore new words to associate with AI. These words will help steer public understanding either away from or towards fallacious or dangerous concepts, and I wonder if that's one of the few ways we non-AI-researchers have outside of regulations to impact the development and implementation of AI.

Works Cited / Notes

(1) How people use Claude for support, advice, and companionship, Anthropic, 6/27/2025. Accessed 4/19/2026.

(2) TechGnosis, Erik Davis (2005), page 12.

(3) Regarding our inability to see humans as humans, consider this excerpt from an Amicus Brief filed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and other religious groups: "Adding transgender status to the equal protection canon would chill religious practice. Religious organizations would face deep uncertainty about the reliability of their First Amendment right to exercise religion. That result is wrong. The equal protection of law should not be expanded by sacrificing rights embodied in the written Constitution."

Not a lawyer here, but this is not only going against the Church's official stance of "tolerance" and its own groundbreaking 2015 legislation that secured protections from discrimination for gay and transgender people, but it also seems to be a bad faith reading of the U.S. Constitution's protections for the practice of religion: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..." (Amendment 1 to the U.S. Constitution). Allowing trans people to remain a protected class somehow destabilizes and prohibits the free exercise of religion? Really?

All of this is especially concerning with the third red flag alert given to the U.S. from the Lemkin Institute, which suggests there is significant concern we're on the path to trans genocide.

Full Brief, quote above from page 9. Accessed 4/20/2026

(4) Have We Trained AI to Lie to Itself — And to Us?, Your Undivided Attention, 4/16/2026.

(5) Claude's Character, Anthropic, 6/8/2024. Accessed 4/19/2026

Lack of Poetry

Jess Brown — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:22:51 +0000

In my zeal to participate in the technological revolution of which we are inseparably a part, I feel like I've lost connection to many of "the humanities." Art—that thing most precious and increasingly more difficult to find—has taken the role of the background; something that exists, but that doesn't draw our attention after the first notice. I feel trapped in "gathering mode," where I'm constantly seeking what is new, and never revisiting what I know is powerful to me.

This became very clear to me over the past two months, because I was forced to regularly revisit fifty poems that I had to judge for a contest. The anxiety I had in selecting the winners was awful; the work involved in reading and analyzing the poetry was arduous. Mostly, the exercise was revelatory for me about my relationship with poetry and how technology has, at least in my case, pushed me away from this art form. It's a loss that we all may be feeling without knowing it.

Contemporaries

I was so nervous about judging these poems that I revisited my old AP Literature book from high school to remind myself how to read and understand poetry, and also how to do literary analysis on it. From that, I determined there had to be a system for me to give every poem a fair chance. This wasn't going to be about which poems I personally like the best (though it's impossible to get around personal bias), rather I wanted to make sure that the right poems received recognition.

My method of judging was this:

Read every poem once, then leave them for a few days.
Read every poem out loud, then leave them for a few days.
Do a literary analysis on every poem, then leave them for a few days.
Choose the finalists (all of the poems that had a shot), then leave them for a few days.
Choose the top 3 winners and the top 3 honorable mentions.
Agonize over the decision.

The poems weren't that great when I first started reading. It was a little boring. Then I started to get through poems about the death of life-long partners, the horrible experience of dementia, and the death of parents. I almost cried at finishing one, but I pushed down that terrible feeling because I didn't want to empathize or think about how much I saw myself in the poem.

There were poems that felt like memories: set in places that I knew or that were similar to my upbringing. There were poems that made me chuckle; poems that made me angry; poems that were confusing at first, then profound later; poems that were uncomfortable.

It was striking to me how much I could relate to somewhat niche topics and experiences. This particular poetry contest is for my state and therefore I found myself among familiar territory both literally and culturally. Everything from fly-tying (for fishing) to celebrating a special kind of tree that is prevalent and famous in my state to the religious landscape (including both the majority views and the minority struggles). This familiarity wasn't always nice, but it got me thinking about how different it feels to read poetry from contemporaries—and especially those in the vicinity—compared to how most of us tend to be introduced to poetry.

From my personal observations, it seems like poetry is not something most people read consistently. It certainly doesn't get the spotlight for the arts among my peers and what I can tell from younger generations. Poetry seems to be for children's books or English majors or school assignments. It also seems to me that poetry is only "cool" when it's in the form of song lyrics (nothing wrong with that as you'll see later, but it's still limiting). For whatever reason, the general public has left poetry for academics and awkward love stories. Maybe it's because we associated poetry in school with older poetry from the early twentieth century at the latest, which meant that the language was harder to understand, and the topics might be more difficult to relate to.

Being able to break the barrier and read these contemporary poems was surprisingly refreshing—after I got over the initial boredom. Re-reading the poems (and knowing that I had to read each one at least three times) was exactly the trick I needed to shake off my modern habits of only seeking novelty and find the artistry within the work that it takes to engage with poetry.

It's Not About Ideas

I happened to start watching a YouTube channel about "close reading" and particularly about poetry by ex-Harvard professor Adam Walker a few months prior to being offered the chance to judge this poetry contest. One thing he mentioned briefly in a video took me by surprise. He noted that when it comes to poetry, it's not about the idea, it's about the language.

Wow. That's such a bold statement to me.

In my Silicon Valley saturated business brain, everything is about the idea. Developers, designers, marketers all live their professional lives coming up with or evaluating ideas. The message that is out there is that if you just have the right idea, you're practically halfway done with the journey to success. One of the most common messages in AI marketing is that now you can have AI do the execution on your amazing idea. Don't mind the ever-increasing pile of failed apps and start-ups along the way, your idea of "Uber for <insert service here>" could make you a millionaire!

Poetry laughs at the worship of ideas, because Walker is right: it's not about having an idea, it's about expression. It's pretty much as opposite to the technology sector's values as you can get. And that's why poetry is so interesting, so bold. That's also why AI-generated rhymes aren't poetry: because it's too focused on the idea (it's also not expression for the AI or for the prompter, but we can worry about the art argument in another article).

When I started to get to know my set of poems, not as some kind of product to be evaluated or as a mere entertainment activity, the poetry started to speak to me. I would be listening to someone or doing something around the house and I would be reminded of one of the poems. Seeing birds or flowers outside might trigger my recall of a line that I had read. A phrase or a figure of speech would connect back to one of the pieces. It was like I was extending the conversation of the pieces—even the less great ones—into my life; mulling them over subconsciously, finding ways that the imagery was spot-on, or noticing sensory experiences.

Poetry demands revisiting it. Going back with different eyes after some time is extremely helpful, not just for judging a poetry contest, but for the experience of the art. So many forms of art feel like building a relationship with a person. Sure, you can treat someone as an NPC—a background character—by only ever acknowledging their existence, maybe talking about the weather. Or you could take an interest in them, who they are, and what they have to say. Art can be listened to, approached over and over, and can even listen to you. I think the slowness that art and poetry demand is what can help us detoxify our phone-based attention draining habits and reignite the passion for the world and humanity that we used to have more abundantly.

The cool thing about this is that poetry is actually more accessible than it seems. There are poetry contests all over the world that post their poems publicly online. There are printed books at your local library. And, even more accessible, is in your favorite songs. You've probably looked up the lyrics to a song before—but have you ever revisited it? What if you made it a practice to separate the melody and the words every-so-often to just sit with the language and expression? I've been obsessed with the Sinners movie soundtrack, so if you want some phenomenal, emotional, gut-wrenching, beautiful lyrics to examine, you can’t go wrong with that album! (If you haven’t watched the movie: “Séance,” “Sinners (by Rod Wave),” and “Can’t Win for Losin’” are some top picks from the soundtrack for lyrics.)

Cyborg

We've talked a lot about practices to slow down as a way to counteract the fast-paced digital environment we inhabit, and I think poetry is an effective, though unpopular, way to re-center. I wish I could share some of the poems I read, because they really have become a part of me in a way over these last few months. I find them surprising me with a visit in my mind or inspiring thoughts about my childhood culture or comforting me in the anxious thoughts of future pain.

I suppose it's only fair for me to be vulnerable now, and let you take the role of poetry judge. Here's a poem that I wrote back in 2021, when I was in deep pain facing rejection from my people after having gotten married to my wife the year prior.

Hymn of the Hated

Was it not Thee whom I have loved?
Worthy of love I wished I could be,
Never quite sure that you wanted me.

Told I belong, but nowhere to stand
All that I have, I gave it to Thee
Where is the love Thou promised to me?

Hymn of the hated,
fallen the knee.
How could I ever
hope it could be?
Hymn of the hated,
saved by a grace
greater than we
were willing to face.

Taken by doubts, I gave all of me
Hoping for promises never to be.
Found on an island, swallowed by sea

Master of oceans, of sands, and life,
Find it in Thee to save me this strife.
Take me home and make me Thine,

Or else find me gone from Thy sight.
Help me or save me, or remove my fight
Banish or love me, just show me a light.

—Jess Brown, 11/28/21

The Case for Thai Lesbian Dramas

Jess Brown — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:04:34 +0000

You may have heard that "representation" is important to minorities and marginalized groups. But why? What's the big deal about having a gay character or a person of color on the screen? (And, technically, not just on the screen but contributing meaningfully to the plot...)

The obvious—and valuable—benefit to diverse representation in media is that people can see themselves more easily in different situations. We recognize experiences that are unique to our combination of race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and any other number of qualities we relate to. It also has the complementary effect of helping others gain empathy for people who are not like themselves. The more we see diversity, the easier it is to relate to more people. The less fear we have of people who are different in some way.

I was raised in an exceptionally homogenous area: almost everyone was white, almost everyone was the same religion, almost everyone was upper-middle-class. There were clear values, accepted gender roles, expectations on family composition, and a very clear path that children were supposed to take: school; church activities and achievements (based on sex assigned at birth, e.g. Boy Scouts for males, "Personal Progress" for females); and finally the two-to-three step coming-of-age process: mission (for males), college, marriage.

My dad would tell us about how when we started growing up, we would see our friends make bad or, at least, different choices. I was very confused by this, because up until my senior year in high school, all of my friends were checking all of the boxes prescribed by my community: high-achieving, scholastic, sporty, pro-social, active Church members. Then something happened that shattered my whole world.

Can you come pick me up? my friend asked over the cell phone speaker. She was clearly afraid and upset. I assured her I was on my way and I jumped into my dad's car to go find my friend. When I saw her walking down the quiet neighborhood road, I was starting to get scared. I'd never seen her so upset and my mind came up with a hundred different things that might have happened. She got into the passenger seat, and I clumsily asked how she was doing.

My mom found out... she said, breathing heavily and shaking, that I'm a lesbian.

Dumbfounded. That wasn't in my hundred predicted possibilities. What does that even mean? I might've thought to myself. However, I quickly turned into supportive-friend mode—who cares what that means, I needed to console her.

“That’s ok. You’re ok,” I assured her. We went back home and talked. Unfortunately, other things happened that day when her parents tracked her down that were deeply disappointing to me about how they and other people in my community handled my friend’s unwanted outing. I saw how fear impacted previously close relationships, how a community that boasted its loving nature failed to uphold its own values.

That day, and especially that moment of confession in the car, would become a memory that visited me daily for many years. Why? Why was this so impactful to me? At some point in college, I would realize that lesbian was a word that described a human experience that overlapped with myself—although I would never and, for certain personal reasons, still don't identify as a lesbian. Instead of seeing this closeness to my friend's experience as a positive thing (I'm not alone?!) it was mashed up into a giant mess of shame that I used to self-flagellate for the next decade.

You see, lesbian was one of those words that was whispered in my community, if said at all. It was a scary word. So intensely scary that even now it chokes in my throat on occasion, despite my intense love for the people in this population, among whom is my own wife. I'd rather say, "gay," before, "lesbian." It still took me quite a long time to realize that lesbian just means someone identifying as a woman whose sexual preference is other women. Basic, simple. But that fear of all things queer in my faith tradition and neighborhood growing up made it impossible for me to even know what I was experiencing, which led to silent suffering, ostracization, and confusion for why I didn't belong even though I had all of the boxes checked—except for the obsession-with-boys box, but that one didn't seem to matter ;).

Media-Made Misogyny

If you looked through my YouTube channel subscriptions just six or seven years ago, you would see an array of exclusively male-hosted channels. There was a great diversity of topics from sports/fitness to python coding to graphic design to bushcraft, but absolutely none of them were exclusively run by females. I told myself I just preferred these channels because the female influencers out there only made content about boring things like hair and make-up.

It was the same rhetoric I used to justify why my friends were always tomboys or at least weren’t on the most extreme feminine side of the gender spectrum. I thought it was just because I could better relate to masculine-themed topics and activities—masculinity was the only valuable side of anything. If someone was "too girly," there was simply nothing interesting we could talk about or bond over.

After 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests helped me realize that I was still not listening to different voices, I started to finally diversify who I read, who I watched, and who I listened to. This has been the most rewarding and uplifting choice I’ve made in my media and literature habits, by the way. That process also showed me that it wasn't just my preferences that kept me in a male-dominated echo chamber, because it takes work to find content and voices that are outside of the mainstream norms.

The point here is that even into my early thirties, my media consumption has been dominated with misogynistic thoughts and habits. And I blame myself, but I also blame the media in the West for continuing to reinforce stereotypes as well as blatantly bad power structures. Growing up, every movie, every show, and later every YouTube video I watched tended to treat women as boring, unintelligent (or at least not intellectually stimulating), or as decoration. The characters that were most interesting were the men. They had the celebrated parts whether as protectors, providers, or paternal wisdom dispensers. Their roles were diverse, deep, and well-explored (this is starting to sound like what we saw with gendered robot characters). Women in most mainstream media seemed to be supporting the male roles or were always eventually forced into relationship with the lead males (The X-Files, anyone?).

How could I resist the pull towards male-led content or storylines when none of the female roles connected with me in any way? There's our call back to the importance of "representation," that we mentioned earlier. While I am not the spokesperson for the female audience, I still think that media has excluded a large number of women—even straight, cisgender women—in favor of replaying the same old gender-jail that we've had for centuries. To be sure, there are outliers, and I was a sheltered kid, so I wouldn't have recognized the power in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Xena: Warrior Princess by being great category-breakers. However, something has recently helped to shift my views about women, particularly in media, and has made it easier for me to listen and to seek out female / feminine voices.

Thai Lesbian Dramas

A few years ago, my wife and I were looking for something interesting to watch since we had run out of shows that both of us were interested in (see again, need for representation). Thanks to the algorithm, we somehow stumbled upon an international production that actually had a lesbian couple—even more startling, it was in Thai (Asia is not exactly known for queer-acceptance, let's put it that way).

Thailand was the first country in Southeast Asia, the second in Asia after Taiwan and the 38th in the world to legalise same-sex marriage. Polling suggests that a significant majority of Thai people support the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

—Same-sex marriage in Thailand, Wikipedia, accessed 4/4/26

Immediately we were hooked. There was an explosion of "GL" media primarily from Thailand, especially since 2024, that centered queer characters as the actual main characters. It was so refreshing, fun, and has introduced us to a whole culture and side of the world that wasn't in the picture at all before. We've devoured these series, and it's astounding to me how much content is out there—way more than anything made in the U.S. It's almost like Thailand saw the gap and decided to do something about it. While I'm not sure of the motivations, and it certainly has been profitable for the media companies creating these series, it still seems like there's a different take on queer stories than those that we have in the West.

The West has a few main themes, especially when you niche down to just the lesbian-specific films: pain and suffering; wild and irreverent; and a few normal-feeling ones (like movies that anyone could watch). In contrast, Thai lesbian dramas have a huge span of themes, settings, and characters. Want the clash of a small-town farmer and big-city diva? You got it. Want a story about choosing love over revenge for murdered parents? There's a few. Want to see corporate rivals or women who are trying to save their small family business? What about dealing with extremely difficult parents or having extremely accepting parents?

The more series I devour, the more I see a breadth and depth in women—especially women that I'm not drawn to—that I've never seen anywhere else. Every series helps me see women solving problems, making choices, affecting their own reality, building and destroying things, making mistakes, making things work, being creative, being witty and charming and awkward and headstrong and submissive and clever and I love every single flavor of this diverse presentation.

It seems so simple, but I literally haven't seen anything like this before, where women are celebrated for who and how they are. They are the main characters. The men don't get to be the heroes that diminish the contributions of women to the story. These series treat the women as people, not as decorations. It just feels different than almost any other mainstream film or series in the West (queer or otherwise).

The thing that really makes me appreciate these series, too, is the potential for immense good to come from them as the years go on. As popularity grows, as queer teens and adults alike discover this vast content library, we have a queer-positive place to see ourselves and others reflected in media. Even better, I'm hoping that straight and cisgender people will also watch some of them.

So many Thai dramas are unapologetic in how the characters are. Most will have a character state something like, "she's into women," and everyone just gets it—even if they're mildly surprised at the information. No fuss, no shame, no pearl-clutching (well, sometimes pearl-clutching, and those stories are still important to portray). To have a huge majority of stories where queerness is the norm could mean we start seeing fewer awful reactions in the real world, like what my friend experienced with her parents and our community.

Cyborg

Media has a huge role in impacting our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. Praise to Thailand for their contribution to a more accepting outlook on LGBTQ+ people. Even if it's not "intentional," I think that they will have helped change the world for the better.

I am astounded at how these shows have helped reshape my thinking about women. It really does sound awful to admit that I have such an ingrained, internalized misogyny, but it is true. And I can't tell you sufficiently how breaking down these patterns of thought just through watching lesbian shows has changed me. If you want to watch, here are some of our favorites:

Pluto: Love this one. On her wedding day to a man, Oom tells her identical twin sister Ai-oon to break up with her lover for her—May, a woman who lost her sight in an accident. Oom ends up in a coma that night and Ai-oon has to decide whether to go through with the break-up or keep pretending to be Oom after she falls for May. Makes me cry every time I watch it.
Heartcode: A woman looks for answers after her father's death is suspiciously ruled a suicide. Reconnects with a childhood friend that she can't help but fall in love with, even though her lover's father might have been involved in the pseudo-suicide case.
Reverse with Me: A woman with the power to reverse time in small increments tries to help save the one she loves.
Us: A woman seeking revenge on a doctor for medical malpractice that cost her parents' lives finds herself in love with the doctor's daughter.
Petrichor: A crime-fighting mystery as a police officer and medical examiner take on cases together, including one that threatens their very lives.

I promise you won't become a lesbian even after watching such great productions—after all, I watched The Light Between Oceans with my parents and still didn't turn straight. You may, however, be changed for the better, but that might be a risk you’re willing to take.

All or Nothing

Jess Brown — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:01:02 +0000

Ones and zeroes. This is what computers know, right? It may not mean anything to us, but people generally know that the basic language of computers is this simple two-option system: binary. We see it all over in ads and media: "code" either looks like gibberish or a heap of 0-1 patterns.

However, just because it uses binary doesn't mean it has to be binary. I was baffled to learn that the elegant on/off states that binary provides (0 = off, 1 = on) are not the required system for computing. It just happens to be the easiest way to clearly distinguish the amount of electricity going through.

According to UC Berkeley Computer Science Professor, Sarah Chasins:

The very first computer that we...recognize as a computer, the ENIAC, actually used base 10...Remember that the way that we're representing this information inside the computer is by how much electricity is flowing through a part of the computer...

As she explains in the video, as electricity is measured, the two opposite ends are the most obvious: electricity is going through or it is not. However, we can measure thresholds of the electricity, similar to a dimmer switch for a lightbulb. You can make the lightbulb less bright, but it gets harder to be precise with the setting for a dimmer switch than a standard on/off switch. You may not always dim the light to the exact same amount every time—what's a three in a ten-position dimmer switch? How do we know when we rolled the switch to a four?

This is potentially very important information to be aware of at a time where we use computers as metaphors for our lived experiences and even the systems of our bodies. When people say things like, "the human brain is like a computer" or that "the human body is a machine," I think we are setting up potentially dangerous structures of thought.

Now, I'm not a doctor, so I can't be fully confident in my science/understanding of the human body, but I don't think that a "machine" is a great metaphor for how bodies work, and I have heard this critique by others who are more likely to know what they're talking about. But even if it were a good metaphor, we lose some of the nuance that is critical to understanding our health. For example, we may start to devalue rest—our bodies are machines? Then we better push and push and work and work. People become proxies for productivity, burning themselves out and wearing themselves to breakdown.

I think the same issues lie in the public's general knowledge of the binary system being the root of computing. We may start to collectively accept the thinking error that every choice, every chance, every thing is an all-or-nothing contest. You either have or have not. You either win or lose. You're either good or evil. You're either man or woman. You're either worthy or worthless.

This reduction to binary makes things simple, sure. It may even seem to be more clear. The clarity is an illusion, though, caused largely by the abstraction from reality that binary thinking relies on. Anyone who has had to confront any situation or experience or relationship that breaks the expectations of social norms or personal beliefs knows that human life is not so simple.

Divorce, for example, has been stigmatized and therefore carries huge amounts of shame, but it cannot be considered an intrinsically bad thing. Divorce may mean freedom from an oppressive or toxic relationship for one or both partners. Just because it has consequences, doesn't mean it should be avoided if it's the right thing to do. Crucially, for those who know someone who has been through divorce (including if that's yourself), we must help reassert to that person that they still belong in relationship with you and "us"—that they aren't unworthy, they aren't their divorce, they aren't cast out.

Same for many other situations, like for those who are LGBTQIA+, where choices are presented that are far more difficult to operate on than a simple yes or no system. "Coming out" isn't a one-time event, it happens all of the time when meeting new people, and a queer person has to constantly determine whether it is safe to be "out" or whether they need to use evasive techniques when it comes to talking about themselves. For those not on clear ends of a spectrum—whether for gender, sexual orientation, or any other experience—the struggle to explain or express yourself can get tricky. Are you really queer if you say you're bisexual? Are you really black if your mom was white? Are you really able to do math if you're female?

Binaries in social constructions seem to lead us to these harsh, stereotype-rich, demeaning forms of measurements. "Are you enough?" becomes the ultimate question. If it's all or nothing, 1 or 0, then someone has to decide what the threshold is and then dogmatically reinforce that imagined line. The reality of human experience lacks those clear lines.

Rear-View Mirror

Jess Brown — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:47:16 +0000

Marshall McLuhan (our favorite techno-prophet here) and Quentin Fiore wrote this highly relevant observation in their 1967 book, The Medium Is The Massage:

"When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

—pgs 74-75

I'm seeing this more and more in my personal experience, but also in other people's reactions to generative AI. Whether it's expressed as anger and frustration at work or reminiscing the "old days" when we used StackOverflow for code help and stock photo sites for imagery, there is a lot of tension that we as a society are dealing with due to this new phase. I certainly agree that we look to the most recent past when faced with something new, but I also wonder if we aren't doing it enough.

The last two years, I've been stunned by the lack of push-back from the general public against generative AI. That doesn't mean it's not there—quite the contrary—but the sentiment seems to be getting buried, even in my feeds where I'm actively pursuing AI-critical arguments in my content. Instead of thoughtful discussions about boundaries and appropriate usage (or anything else), I see fear-mongering statements or resigned messages:

If you don't use AI, you'll be left behind.
AI might not replace you, but you will be replaced by someone who uses AI.
This is the next big thing, it's here to stay.
Adapt or die.

This seems extreme to me, because as companies scramble to shove AI into everything: products, ads, workflows, tools, etc. it doesn't feel the same as previous technological "revolutions" I've lived through like the affordable personal computer, Google's search engine and the web 1.0, or social media. Instead of the gradual ramp up in adoption, it's felt more like getting hit over the head. Is it because the last 25 years have been defined by continuous change? Did we marketers finally succeed in our efforts to sell the "digital transformation" concept to the masses of companies out there, and therefore that trickled into the personal lives of the public? Are we all too distracted by all of the problems that our politicking has caused during this same period? Have we become desensitized to the novelty and nuance of new tech so that it still just looks the same or, at least, what we expect to see out of technology at this point?

Reflections

While we can use our "rear-view mirror" like a coping mechanism (and I suspect McLuhan and Fiore are somewhat critiquing this practice) I don't think we should reject it, either. Sure, there's nostalgia and the risk of abandoning agency in the current situation due to forever mourning the past (getting trapped in unhelpful thought patterns of "things were better when..."). There's also a certain clarity that comes with this practice: why were these previous things so impactful? What have we lost in the transition? What can we bring back? What should we avoid going forward? Are we on the same trajectory as we were before?

The contrast of previous tech and today's tech can help us re-evaluate what he have, where we are, and where we're going. This is active engagement that ultimately helps all of us draw boundaries where they need to be, rather than the obsequious acceptance of what the sales teams say.

In that spirit of reflection, we've covered some intense topics this quarter, from robotic representations and reinforcements of harmful gender roles; to considering the path to evil; to oppressive systems. These topics have raised lots of questions just for me, and I'd love to know what kind of questions have been raised for you.

Feel free to reply to this email or share anonymously on my Google Form. I want to make sure I'm covering topics that matter to you even as I continue to explore the intersection of technology and humanity.

"The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins."

—McLuhan, Fiore, pg 142

The Critical Replacement Theory

Jess Brown — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:37:39 +0000

Last week, we looked at The Lonely, an episode of The Twilight Zone made in 1959. The only female in the episode is Alicia, the robot smuggled onto a prison asteroid to help the sole prisoner deal with his solitary confinement. Why was the robot made to be a woman? Why couldn't a companion robot be a man? If the prisoner were detained on earth, he would've had male prison-mates. Surely there's nothing wrong with males having male friendships, right? Maybe it's ok in larger settings, like at work, or on the throne of a kingdom, or on the golf course, but one man and one man can't really be alone together for very long?

Homophobia aside, there's another difficult topic to unpack that I think is evident in the vast majority of robot representations of women in popular culture (not to mention the default voices for real-world AI assistants being female like Cortana, Alexa, etc.). From Metropolis (1927) to Subservience (2024), we have a long line of female-looking robots that are intended to perform a specific kind of service: companionship (ironic innuendos 100% present here).

To be fair, Sci-Fi is often an exploratory medium that can critique culture, technology, and society...but sometimes it simply reinforces stereotypes and systemic structures. With that in mind, let's start asking some questions when we see women represented in robotic form.

Who's Getting Replaced by Technology?

CEOs, trust-fund babies, politicians, and rich people in general don't appear to be too worried about being replaced by technology, especially given that so many of these groups have invested in the technology that does replace jobs—just the kind they don't have to deal with. I guess that leaves a large slice of the population to fend for ourselves: the middle and lower classes. It's much easier to automate, delegate, and replace people with less power and influence, not necessarily because the work they perform is easy, but because the lack of power prevents them from fighting back or saying no.

How dubious, then, to see companionship be a common theme for automation and replacement. Psych 1010 told me that both men and women prefer to go to women for emotional support—the pinnacle of what I would consider to be companionship. Companionship is about emotional intimacy, which can be completely platonic, as in close friendships. Yes, it's not necessarily sexual, but it often carries undertones, if not explicit scenes, in films and stories with women robots/AI (see Subservience, Her, BuffyBot from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and I would submit that our Twilight Zone episode belongs here, too).

Let's take a second and compare this to male-coded robots. Bicentennial Man is one of the few robot/AI movie that I've seen where a robo-man performs the role of a companion—not just a thing that follows the main character around, but actually appears to care for and about a human, with reciprocated feelings from that same human. More often, androids are battle-bots, killers, protectors, comic relief, scheming tricksters, laborers, mentors, guides, and/or philosophers.

Why does it feel like robots that are masculine or even those that aren't gendered have a vast array of possible roles, but feminine robots tend pretty steeply toward traditional roles for women (as sex objects, as close companions, as home-making or domestic care service providers)? Could it be that there is some subliminal if not intentional oppression here?

I read Jurassic Park almost ten years ago, but something that the character Ian Malcolm observed in the book has rattled around my mind ever since:

“The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics…Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?”

—Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

Maybe we can say it's a good thing that we're imagining these female-like robots because it implies that we're finally automating and replacing the housework that women have been unfairly consigned to based solely on their "gender." But why are these same robots conveniently able to provide other pleasures to male owners? Are we replacing the work that we don't want to do? Or are we actually replacing the human with a brain and a concept of consent with a slave that can't talk back; can't say no; can't get tired; can't get sick? Is this less about labor and more about reinforcing and defining womanhood in ways that can be exploited—so that even if you don't have a robot, you can treat your wife the same way?

While author Jane Caputi was setting up an argument for a different myth than these women-robots, I think her summary here is just as applicable:

...in a patriarchy, myths of male superiority and victory over the female must be continually retold, participated in, and internalized.

—Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture, page 24

This is, at least from my perspective, why these feminine machines fall so easily into this stereotype of the servile housewife (this idea is blatantly the plot of The Stepford Wives, 1975). In our current system, we have to keep retelling the story that the nature of womanhood is about submission, domesticity, and not about sexual autonomy (or any real autonomy, for that matter). If that is the nature of "woman" then it follows that even the machines that take on the "woman" identity would have to abide the same rules.

Of course, if the robots are deviant, then they fall equally into the archetypes and myths that Caputi does describe in her book, such as becoming the dangerous, independent woman-robot; a deceptive snake/dragon lady (with sexual connotations); an emasculating machine, etc. probably ending up with the robot's destruction (like in Subservience, Metropolis).

[Jaws] is the ritual retelling of an essential patriarchal myth—male vanquishment of the female symbolized as a sea monster, dragon, serpent, vampire, or some other creature, administering a necessary fix to a society hooked on and by male control. The purpose of Jaws and other myths of its genre is to instill dread and loathing for the female, and they usually culminate in her annihilation.

—Goddesses and Monsters, page 23

Cyborg

It is becoming more clear to me how important the stories we tell are, the more of these AI/robot stories I encounter. I've been shocked at what some of our stories tell us about consent, what they say about women and their abilities, what they say about our society's heroes, what they say about who deserves power and who does not. Our stories influence our society's values and vice versa.

Despite much talk of God being "love" and associated with creation, the phrase "I am God" is not uttered in delivery room rooms by mothers, or about those getting the news that they have received the Nobel Peace Prize.

...though that phrase is uttered frequently by "victorious players of violent video games," as well as serial killers—or talk about serial killers on news, films, etc.—as Caputi demonstrates in the introduction of her book...

The dominant action of god in the Abrahamic patriarchal religions is an all-male being whose defining characteristics seem to be omnipotence, jealousy, righteousness, judgment, and dominance. This notion of god powers all sorts of terrorism: religious, political, criminal, familial, militarist, nuclear, and any combination of these as power-mad men take up that mythic role, "playing god" by waging war, accumulating fortunes, toying with others' lives, and lording it over everybody else.

—Goddesses and Monsters, page 16-17

The close relationship of masculinity and god in our culture spills over into our representations and conceptualizations of technology. This includes diminishing, demeaning, and demonizing women, femininity, and other marginalized gender identities. With so much emphasis on creating all-powerful technologies that provide god-like abilities to us humans, what are we hiding or replacing? Are we really so self-absorbed that we'll opt for a toy instead of a partner, just because of the allure of god-like power and ability to reign over something else?

My title here (The Critical Replacement Theory) is referencing the untrue, racist conspiracy theory that white people are being intentionally replaced by non-white immigrants. The theory plays on xenophobia; on the fears of seeing lowering birth rates in white populations; and on fears of mixed-race partnerships/marriages. It's not only false, it's exceptionally dangerous. I'm using this allusion to the theory ironically, because while "The Great Replacement Theory" is a fantasy of victimhood, there is a real danger of replacing—or erasing—women and women's rights. I'm not saying that we really will create a world where women somehow don't exist and only human males and female-looking robots walk the streets. I am saying that there is something sinister in fantasizing about such a world: one in which women are enslaved. After all, that was the world that not too long ago was a reality for most women in the West, if not globally—in the U.S., women have only had unrestricted access to hold credit cards in their name since 1974 (that's only 52 years(!!)).

Women have not been seen as human beings with equal ability or rights alongside men for many thousands of years, so all of the newfound freedoms that women enjoy in our modern era is extremely new. The connection between a robotic woman as property is all too similar to our actual history. The Holy Bible clearly demonstrates through its legal descriptions and other stories that women were viewed as property.

What this collection of laws in Deuteronomy 22:22-29 indicates is that rape was thought to be a crime against the property rights of men. The autonomy and agency of the victim was not relevant...A marriage constituted a man's sale of his daughter to another man...

But until she was engaged or married, a woman's body was the property of her father, who stood to benefit financially from the bride price that would be paid upon her marriage. The rape of a virgin who was neither engaged nor married was a property crime against the father. According to Deuteronomy 22, then, the punishment for rape depends on the type of claim that a man has to the victim's body.

—The Bible Says So, Dan McClellan, pg 110

What's my point? I think we need to start turning an actual critical eye on what we're doing, where we're going, and why we're doing these things and going these places. I used to fear feminism so I understand if this article feels threatening regardless of your own gender. But the more I listen, read, and experience, the more I do see that this isn't about man-hatred or intentional disparagement of "traditional values"; it's a life-and-death, world-changing attempt to put all humans on equal grounds. Humans should not be replaced. Women cannot be replaced. Our technology only ever supports our own motivations, our own goals, our own thoughts because technology is not science—it's a reflection of us.

When we harm the vulnerable and the less-powerful, we eventually harm everyone. If we objectify women, we eventually objectify everyone. If we start replacing women—the role, not necessarily the people—we start to look everywhere for further dominance, control, and possibly violence. Is that acceptable to you?

Ask The Lonely

Jess Brown — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:44:57 +0000

When you're feeling love's unfair
You just ask the lonely
When you're lost in deep despair
You just ask the lonely

—Ask The Lonely, Journey

Often in my imagination as a kid, I would set myself in a barren landscape. No one for many miles, far from civilization. Being an introverted queer kid, my idea of paradise was often this retreat where no people lived. A place where everything was up to me: I would have infinite time for my hobbies, infinite space to wander and explore, and infinite peace from bullies as well as those who preferred shallow, inauthentic relationships.

While this fantasy is impractical and dangerous if ever realized, I still find that isolation is my brain's preference for imagining a peaceful existence. For many, if not most people, however, this would be a torturous hell, even as a fantasy. We are social creatures and we need other humans to thrive (much as I like to tell myself I'm different, I'm not in any way). Isolation is punishment. In the U.S., we use it as one of the highest forms of penal imprisonment.

Since the advent of solitary confinement in the late 18th century, reports have documented the deleterious effects of living in total social isolation...Long-term periods of isolation have been found to significantly affect neurological and psychological health, and this is especially harmful for young people as the human brain continues to develop past age 20, specifically in areas of the brain associated with behavioral control, risk assessment, and planning.

—Solitary Confinement and the U.S. Prison Boom, Ryan T. Sakoda and Jessica T. Simes, pg 3

Despite the controversial nature of this punishment tactic, isolation is still used currently. Imagine, then, if we continued this practice into a future state, where perhaps we have tech companies breaching the newest form of the privatized prison market: isolation in space.

This is what the seventh episode of the classic anthology, The Twilight Zone, examines. More specifically, it involves one more step on the technological rung of this isolation ladder: could a robot help the problem that was created by extreme isolation?

The Lonely

James A. Corry is sentenced to 50 years of solitary confinement on an asteroid 9 million miles from Earth. His only form of human contact is when a space-crew delivers supplies once every few months. Corry is particularly grateful whenever Captain Allenby comes with the crew. Allenby has a soft spot for Corry's situation and often brings him things to stay entertained, like car parts, allowing Corry to build a car from the ground up. This time, Allenby comes with bad news that even after 4 years on the asteroid, Corry's appeals case is still not looking good.

I'm not a murderer! I killed in self-defense! Corry protests to Allenby, who can't do anything about it...not the legal process, anyway.

Allenby tells his crew to bring a large box from their spaceship over to Corry's hut. Allenby tells Corry to do him a favor and wait until he and the crew are out of sight, because the contents of the box could get Allenby in trouble—no car parts this time. After they've delivered the box and start boarding their ship, a crewman can't help but ask the Captain what's in the box.

I don't know...Maybe it's just an illusion. Maybe it's salvation, Allenby replies vaguely.

Back at the hut, Corry reads the instructions that came with the box. It says something to the effect of:

Congratulations, you're now the possessor of a robot...for all intents and purposes, this creature is a woman.

All he has to do is open the lid and the air exposure will get the robot up and running. We cut to see a shot of a woman in what my eyes see as an unflattering dress that feels a little too much like an old-timey religiously-enforced style. That's probably my personal bias coming out, especially after having just heard possessor of a robot which for all intents and purposes...is a woman, which is deeply problematic and evokes that Biblical woman-as-property vibe.

Corry's first look at the robot, Alicia, who stands barefoot in the barren, rocky landscape of the asteroid.

What I find so interesting about this episode is precisely these details, because it reveals the thinking of the time when this was made: 1959. Why this outfit? Why this pose; the hair? Why the human actor playing robot without any visual indicators that she is a robot? Why a woman?

There's a lot to unpack and I'm starting a deep-dive into the research of gender and technology—spoiler: it's deep and more connected than it seems. So for now, I'll leave some of these questions for you to consider and we'll focus on the isolation aspect of this episode.

Corry is unjustly isolated, Allenby feels bad and risks his career to bring him a woman-robot, hoping to help his friend combat the psychological harm of this punishment—the car project hadn't been enough to really help after all. Corry actually first appears disgusted with the thing: pushes her around, says she's not real.

I'm sick of being mocked by the memory of women. And that's all you are.

After the awkward start to this relationship with Alicia (the robot), Corry finds himself 11 months later in a completely different state than the stressed, anxious, and eager condition we met him in.

It's difficult to write down what has been the sum total of this very strange and bizarre relationship.

Is it man and woman? Or man and machine? I don't really know myself. But there are times when I do know that Alicia is simply an extension of me. I hear my words coming from her, my emotions, the things that she had learned to love are things that I love.

I'm not lonely anymore. Each day can now be lived with. I love Alicia, and nothing else matters.

I can't help but see parallels with this reflection and the stories of "AI psychosis," where people fall in love with AI chat bots or AI avatars. I'm not about to provide any kind of medical or psychological advice, but it seems like, especially with sycophantic AI models, people are falling in love with their reflections. Just like Alicia learns to love the things Corry loves (playing checkers, for example), AI models (or at least the systems that deploy the models) are trying to learn from your behavior and get to know you—your preferences, your predictable behavior. When models can use data about you, they can provide answers or experiences that you're more likely to like. This feels like a relationship, where the other "person" is meshing with you; they like what you like—nevermind that they don't have any real preferences themselves and are simply feeding back to you what you like.

Despite the apparent shallowness of Corry's explanation for his love of Alicia, he claims that his loneliness is gone. Is that not a sign that the love is genuine? Has the robot successfully filled the void that isolation rifted?

Not So Fast

Allenby shows up one day with news of a pardon. Corry is a free man and he can leave his asteroidal prison immediately. In fact, the ship only has 20 minutes to load up and take off since this was sudden and unplanned initially. Corry jumps from happy to disturbed when the Captain elaborates that Corry can bring only 15 pounds of stuff and the robot counts as weight, not as a person.

Faced with the fact that he can't bring Alicia, he freaks out and shows Alicia to the crew, trying to have her convince them that she's a real woman. Alicia stands there, hardly getting any words out when Allenby pulls out a gun and shoots her, which rather quickly convinces Corry to abandon the asteroid and the robot he had supposedly fallen in love with. No tears are shed, no moment of silence, or even displays of anguish. Corry acts like he just lost a toy that really didn't matter and boards the ship to go home.

What?! After all this poetic narration about how Alicia helped him through one of the worst punishments we can mete out on a human, he just shrugs and leaves the moment she's destroyed? Everyone that has simply watched Cast Away with Tom Hanks is more upset over seeing Wilson, the volleyball, float away than Corry is about the robot he loved getting shot in the face.

This surely deviates from real-world cases of AI love (maybe?), but it highlights one of the disorienting parts of AI relationships: they are not substantial. That doesn't mean that they can't feel substantial—Allenby himself suggested the robot was probably just an illusion—but when the AI is lost, we aren't really harmed. We can always boot up a new one, start over with a similar model, or just move on. When a person dies, they are lost to us; there is a permanence and a substantial, visceral pain. Even darker, when an AI loses its human, it is wholly unaffected.

This is what is deeply disturbing to me as I think about the problem of loneliness and what I consider to be inhumane technological "solutions" to loneliness. The power difference is terrifying. We have the illusion that we are in control—that's how machines work, after all!—and yet our connection to the machine, no matter how earnest, no matter how much it feels like connection, can overpower us with only consequences to the human involved. Hopefully those consequences are mild, but in some heart-breaking cases, it's catastrophic and irreparable.

Cyborg

Allenby's final advice to Corry is that, "All you're leaving behind is loneliness."

Although they're standing over the body with the exploded mechanics where a face used to be, this advice seems to be referring to the entire experience of Corry's solitary confinement. Including, of course, the robot that only superficially quelled the loneliness.

Considering that at least in the story, technology was part of the harm, since imprisoning someone on an asteroid is a scale impossible to match without technology, I wonder if we can draw one more parallel to the real world. Some technology, as we've often explored in this newsletter, is isolating by design. Social media and other deeply addictive virtual experiences are like our own personal shuttle to an asteroid where only our interests occupy the space around us. We know this is a problem, but instead of fixing the spaceship route to isolation, we put AI on the asteroid.

I've asked before and I'll ask again: does a human problem created by technology really get solved by more technology?

Whenever a company comes in claiming to solve loneliness, that's all the warning I need to know that the product will be dangerous if not inhumane. Loneliness does exist in our society, it does hurt people, we do need to help, but this is a human connection problem, not a market-penetration problem. If you really want to help, ask the lonely, talk to the lonely, involve the lonely in your real life. Maybe we'll remember what we used to have before and we can leave the loneliness behind.

You've got some fascination
With your high expectations
This love is your obsession
Your heart, your prized possession
Let down your defenses
Open up to the one who cares

As you search the embers
Think what you've had, remember
Hang on, no don't let go now
You know, with every heartbeat, we learn
Nothing comes easy
Hang on, ask the lonely

—Ask The Lonely, Journey

The Secret of Craftsmanship

Jess Brown — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:39:04 +0000

About four minutes into what seemed like a straightforward woodworking video, the creator took a water buffalo horn and started sawing off large strips that would become the flexible support for the bow she was building. Something about the tone of the video (there was no narration, only the sounds of the workshop, birds, and sometimes gentle music) combined with the beautiful compositions of shots had hooked me in. The novelty of the raw materials and the traditional techniques intrigued me further.

The video is called Making a Chinese Qing Horn Composite Bow and it's a whopping 39-minute display of craftsmanship and artistry, without a shred of attention-hacking, commentary, calls-to-action, or other distractions. We simply get lost in the project of transforming raw materials into a stunning bow.

From her description, she notes:

"I followed traditional methods recorded in ancient Chinese texts as closely as possible. My main reference was 天工开物 (Tiangong Kaiwu), a Ming dynasty encyclopedia documenting traditional Chinese craftsmanship and technology. Throughout the process, I relied on historical records rather than modern simplified techniques."

With each new phase of the project, I was baffled at how tangible all of this felt. I spend almost all of my time on an immaterial craft: websites. Everything I do exists on a screen. My raw material is data and logic. Only a keyboard and a mouse have any tactile connection to my work. But this bow...this had wood and sinew and leather and antler and horn. As I looked longingly at the collage of texture and weight, I also realized something about technology that I hadn't been able to fully connect before.

Technology is an abstraction, ultimately, and while that is a good thing from a productivity perspective, there is also loss that accompanies that abstraction.

For example, with my craft currently being programming, I have abstracted design concepts in my toolbelt that I use to accomplish great work, provide great experiences online, and achieve business outcomes. These abstracted concepts actually do have a basis in reality but you have to work to trace back the principles and apply them outside of a programming context. Not only that, but these principles carry with them a host of knowledge and experience that gets boiled down into something that can be more easily passed along from person to person.

I see that same thing in the traditional techniques that were displayed in the video. While she certainly used modern tools at times like a band saw and a heatgun, the amount of knowledge packaged up as "traditional technique" was astounding. She didn't explain anything, but offered some labels of the materials when she first uses them. "Fish glue," it said simply in the corner of the screen as she melted down something that looked like pieces of golden wax and later brushed the liquid on the bow, applying the horn and tying it in place.

What is fish glue?! How is that made or harvested? It's apparently sticky enough to handle the intense load of a bow at peak draw. How did they figure this out? All of these questions surfaced, but the technique doesn't need to answer them, because it has abstracted those details. All you really need to know is how to prepare the fish glue, how / when to apply it and how to let it cure or bond.

After fish-gluing and then tying cord all along the bow to clamp it down, we see her using these bamboo shafts slipped under the black cord to increase the tension. My guess is that this probably evens out and spreads the tension along the bow to help bond the buffalo horn with the wood. Again, this is a technique—a package of expertise—that has been distilled down into something anyone can learn to apply.

Bamboo tensioners inserted between the binding cord and the buffalo horn.

Just for my sake, I'll highlight this other technique of using twine to help bind the soft shagreen to the curved surface near the handle. I love rope and string, and therefore I love the idea of using it as a way to help clamp something to a non-squared surface.

Using twine to help attach a soft material to a curved surface.

Tekhnē

The word "technology" is built from the Greek tekhnē, suggesting art or skill, some kind of method or system, and "technique" pulls in that same Greek root, becoming the "performance method of an art" (1). For me, understanding this etymology seems to confirm the observation of knowledge being abstracted and packaged up. Where science makes the discovery of discrete information, techniques / technology puts it into action.

As artist Matt Hall remarked after unveiling his Beauchene skull for the Bone Museum:

The secret isn't in the actual techniques because the techniques can be learned by anyone...You can learn to machine. You can learn to mill wood. But you have to [learn] to think about things and...consider how things go together...Putting all those together is really where the secret is. It has nothing to do with the individual techniques. Has everything to do with the amalgamation of those techniques.

—Matt Hall, Exploded Skull: A Craft on the Brink of Extinction, timestamp 7:03

Mimicry is how we learn any technique, whether traditional or modern, and those techniques on their own aren’t sufficient for craft, at least from what I can tell. We can’t get rid of the abstraction, because the abstraction is what makes things learnable. If I had to understand the properties of fish glue, I would never get around to actually using it, because when do you ever stop learning about it sufficiently? At its atomic level? At its historical significance? No, I don’t have to fully understand it before I can use it, but no understanding at all may hold me back a little—for instance, where do I get it? How easily can I replenish my stock? How do I store it? What is it best used on?

Craft is achieved as we start putting together the connections between our knowledge, our experience, and our will—the motivation behind our projects or our work.

That's why this is a celebration for the ancient, the traditional, and even the modern techniques. Everyone has their own set of curated techniques either obtained or forged, and those techniques are further distilled and taught to others. I hope we don't lose that in our never-ending search for faster and easier in the digital space. Although AI has absorbed many of our techniques for digital communication and interaction, if we never learn the basics ourselves and use AI to skip over that, what might we be losing? What gets forgotten when we abstract too far too soon?

Works Cited

technology and technique, Etymonline, accessed 03/02/2026. See also Techne, Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

The Problem with Problem-Solvers

Jess Brown — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:33:42 +0000

I'm a creative problem-solver. —every designer's, marketer's, and slightly-tasteful-developer's personal website headline.

There's nothing that's not upsetting about Hitler's rise to power, but as I've been working through Laurence Rees's book, The Nazi Mind, there is something that I found surprisingly upsetting: there were many smart, capable people that helped. It makes me shudder to hear about brilliant academics like Joseph Goebels, who became the mastermind behind the Nazi propaganda, and their involvement and contribution to the regime. As I've listened to the various people and circumstances that came together to construct the horrendous takeover, an observation started to haunt me: sometimes problem-solvers are solving terrible problems.

Consider this snippet of history where Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany at the time, finally decides to appoint Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Rees summarizes:

Hindenburg was finally persuaded and he made Hitler Chancellor on the 13th of January, 1933. And while it's true that he had concerns about the man he was appointing, the bigger picture was that he had at last achieved his aim: a government that would hopefully bring stability, even if the cost was the destruction of democracy.

—Transcribed at timestamp 5:16:40

Already, we have Hindenburg—who was a war hero and had considerable experience with leadership from his service in the military as well as in politics—who was willing to lose democracy for the right outcomes.

There was undoubtedly a tendency to group-think in Hindenburg and the elite that surrounded him. This psychological phenomenon occurs when members of a group convince themselves that they have reached the correct solution to a problem, even though they haven't properly considered all the negative connotations and potential alternatives. It is particularly likely to occur when decisions are made under stress and when there is a lack of diversity among members of the decision-making group. That was certainly the case here. Hindenburg and his cronies—all of whom came from the same elite background—failed to think about the consequences of appointing Hitler as Chancellor. Instead, they conned themselves into thinking that they could control him once he was in office.

—Transcribed at timestamp 5:17:02

Smart and experienced people made decisions that ultimately contributed to one of the most heinous, violent regimes in recent history.

The Problem-Solver

It's hard to critique this for me, because I built a career on problem-solving. I take great pride in being able to combine a set of conflicting goals and wishes from marketers and find a way to make it happen in code or design. And yet, we can see there are all kinds of problems in the world. Some are pro-social if solved or even in pursuit of solving, like the problem of curing cancer. Some are anti-social like the problem of getting anti-semitic policies put into place with public approval in 1930s Germany.

One aspect that muddies the waters here is that many people are abstracted from their impact. For instance, sometimes we just have a job because we need a job. Maybe this job doesn't directly harm anyone, but it furthers goals that are ultimately destructive. Maybe we don't even know about those goals because the company is so large, you can never know that they are donating to lobbyists that directly conflict with your personal views or freedoms.

Because this is a tough one, I'll borrow a phrase I heard from a panelist on an episode of the Mormon Stories Podcast: "Go easy on people, go hard on systems."

The word "problem" carries with it some negative connotation. It's something that needs to be fixed; solved. It's likely frustrating or painful. If there wasn't a problem, we wouldn't need to worry about it, so the ideal state of a problem is when it is removed—and we love the people who remove the problem! Even when the problem is not necessarily bad, like a math problem in school (ok, maybe still bad), we still approach it with the intention to resolve it.

For many of us Westerners, it's very similar to the concept of a question. Watch next time someone asks a question to someone else, regardless of the situation. We can't leave a question left unanswered—even if our answer is poor. Both a question and a problem are functionally the same: they encourage us to change their state from unresolved to resolved.

We may identify problems in any and every aspect of life, and we prefer to set people loose on these problems to at least work on them, even if they can't fully solve them. The problem, however is amoral—it is neither good nor bad, it's just some kind of state that is unresolved—but their impact and especially how they are resolved can be of moral concern. The loss of democracy is an anti-social deficit to the majority and a benefit to a tiny group of people. A problem for oppressors solved by the oppressors is not a good problem to have solved.

My point here is that we must refrain from keeping our problem-solving out of context. It's never enough to solve problems—anyone and everyone does that. We have to bring the wisdom of application into these issues and choose when to pursue resolution and when to change the problem itself.

Cyborg

In terms of technology, specifically, I think there is a link between our AI use and the problem-solver problem. Like Rees briefly explained about group-think, the psychological phenomenon of reaching bad conclusions despite having many brains working on something together, I'm concerned that our use of AI may actually be group-think at scale in some instances.

This is just an exploration of the concept, but if LLMs/generative AI are ultimately prediction machines that provide a likely accepted answer to a prompt, where is the diversity of thought that is required to combat group-think? A tech bro might insist that the diversity of thought comes from the huge set of training data, except that despite this large set, AI is still biased against race and gender. What if these models are ultimately group-think models, because of their large training set?

The vision of tech optimists is that AI will become superhuman in knowledge and power, but that is contradicted in a lot of ways by the fact that it needs data to provide relevant answers. It technically can't come up with something new, because it tends toward convergence—the most likely accepted answer. Humans may tend toward the same thing, but we also have a "data set" that is well beyond the reach of AI: human connections.

Just a few hundred years ago, human slavery was an acceptable, mainstream practice (in many places, anyway). The rhetoric and conceptualization of slavery as acceptable would be convergent—AI in that setting would advocate for slavery. But we changed. We broke out of the convergence and instead chose to diverge into a different conceptualization of the world and of human rights. What computer program could ever do that? How could AI ever "realize" it was trapped in group-think or harmful patterns of thought? By its very nature, I would argue, it is impossible.

I think questioning generative AI is the best thing we can do given that businesses are scrambling to shove AI into every product, every experience, and every message. Convergence can be a strength and it can also be a weakness—it depends. We can be problem-solvers that judiciously select which problems we choose to work on. AI cannot do this; it may have safety constraints that make it say, "I probably shouldn't help you with that," but it cannot access actual wisdom. AI is a context-unaware problem-solver.

Given what atrocities can be achieved by context-aware human problem-solvers like Joseph Goebels and many, many more in Nazi Germany, what might AI do to gleefully help solve any problem someone puts in front of it?

The Inevitability Paradox

Jess Brown — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:27:37 +0000

Most of the humans at OpenBrain can’t usefully contribute anymore. Some don’t realize this and harmfully micromanage their AI teams. Others sit at their computer screens, watching performance crawl up, and up, and up. The best human AI researchers are still adding value...

These researchers go to bed every night and wake up to another week worth of progress made mostly by the AIs. They work increasingly long hours and take shifts around the clock just to keep up with progress—the AIs never sleep or rest. They are burning themselves out, but they know that these are the last few months that their labor matters.

—AI 2027, "June 2027: Self-improving AI," emphasis added.

I recently attended a 30-minute "lecture" by a Ph.D. who was trying to make sure we were all on the same page with AI. He started by saying something to the effect of:

"You've probably felt worried about your jobs; that they might go away at some point. You need to get over it."

Admittedly, I used to share the same confident bravado. I thought that AI was the answer to all of our problems. I thought it would be the enabler of the disabled, the bringer of wealth to the impoverished, the revealer of truth amidst the false. I thought that people were really the problem: if they just had more technical skills, then it would work out just fine. AI was going to be a rising tide that lifted all boats, which meant that even if your job "went away" you would just get a new job—a better one!

I'm not saying this particular lecturer is wrong or that their statement matches my own misguided thinking. I do think AI is a strong threat to our way of life in our current economy, and I don't know how to imagine a concrete future in different circumstances or in different systems. I'm at a loss for how to move forward besides following the same rut that I already inhabit.

However...

I don't appreciate how this lecturer dismissed the fears and seeming inevitability with the advice to "just get over it." You're offering us our current world but where no one can work to provide for themselves? That's the future you just painted, and that's the future we're supposed to just take?

This is not the world I want, nor the future I will accept.

It's inevitable.

Thanks to current U.S. politics the last few years (this is the most hollow, ungrateful "thanks" I've ever given), I have encountered the concept of "inevitability" more than I ever have. There's a feeling of powerlessness that pervades every video reel I see on my phone's screen. I see violence, murder, abduction, narcissism, blatant abuse of laws and people, and an endless stream of attacks on humanity, dignity, and basic rights.

We're inevitably marching into a fascist future.

There it is: "inevitable."

What if it wasn’t inevitable? Why do I just have to “get over it”? What if our path doesn’t take that route? What if what we do right now—not what we watch, but what we do—could alter that supposedly inevitable destination?

As I understand it, the very act of questioning inevitability is exactly the thing that hurts inevitability. For example, Laurence Rees describes how various people were "converted" to the ultimate cause of the Nazi movement in his book The Nazi Mind, including academic Joseph Goebbels who later becomes extremely close to Hitler:

Above all, it was the certainty with which Hitler expressed his vision that was the basis of his successful subjugation of Goebbels. Rudolf Hess, a leading Nazi, realized how important this quality was for the leader of the Nazi movement. He recognized that Hitler must not weigh up the pros and cons like an academic, he must never leave his listeners the freedom to think something else is right. The great popular leader is similar to the great founder of a religion: he must communicate to his listeners an apodictic faith.

—Transcribed at timestamp: 3:28:50, emphasis added.

If fascism and authoritarianism wants compliance and obedience, then questions interrupt that uniform line of compliance. If the system requires that we are powerless, then it must make us feel powerless, because that's the only way to exert control over huge collections of people. We are our own best prison wardens, because we believe the stories we tell ourselves.

Is it inevitable? Yes and no at the same time.

If powerlessness and compliance are the ingredients to inevitability, then we have to ask the questions and make the subtle changes that will grind the efficient march to a slow and sloppy motion.

Cyborg

"What if?" is our easiest question, but I like to take that and reframe it towards imaginative action, rather than just imagination. My favorite question starts with: "How might we...?" I stole this question-starter from, ironically, the book Sprint by Jake Knapp, which is about prototyping and designing for successful products. Perhaps by using this action-first prompt, we can prototype a future that is preferable to the "inevitable" one we're told is coming.

How might we elevate human artists over AI slop?
How might I change the feeling of powerlessness for me and my closest friends?
How might my family and I communicate without relying on social media apps?
How might I reduce the amount of money I give to businesses that support groups that are in direct conflict with my values?
...insert your question here.

While the lecturer may have had a point that fear and despair are not especially helpful, "just get over it" is equally unhelpful. AI companies, fascism, and all other abusive systems want the same thing from you: to stop thinking. Fear does not lend itself to higher-order thinking and rationality, so that state is indeed unhelpful and furthers the goals and agendas of abuse. Likewise, distraction, endless and mindless entertainment prevent us from thinking critically and I personally feel like content feeds subtly drain my energy, removing the motivation to take time to think and to question.

We don't need a single savior to lead us out of the inevitable rubble. We need all of us nobodies to shake the dust from the systems and sing out for humanity.

We will not lose our agency.

Resources to Explore

Your Undivided Attention Podcast: The Crisis That United Humanity—and Why It Matters for AI. "In 1985, scientists in Antarctica discovered a hole in the ozone layer that posed a catastrophic threat to life on earth if we didn’t do something about it. Then, something amazing happened: humanity rallied together to solve the problem."

AI 2027: AI forecast featuring a predictive timeline of events through the year 2027 (we're already almost halfway through...). This is based on experts' analysis and opinions in an attempt to help us recognize warning signals and ways that we might be able to steer AI towards a future that we do want to inhabit.

The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History, by Laurence Rees. A historical examination of how the Nazi movement gained power. This is an excellent read for context and psychological factors that influenced the infamous and horrifying regime. As Rees asserts early on, we don't learn "lessons" from history, because there's never an exact replica of circumstances, but there are warnings from history that prove to be exceptionally relevant.

Bird-Noticing

Jess Brown — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:50:48 +0000

Raptor. Is there a cooler word in the whole English language? It feels fast, sleek, fierce. As a Millennial, my relationship to this word is tied up in the movie Jurassic Park where raptors were the dinosaurs that ate the most people. However, as a kid I also had a small obsession with the book, My Side of the Mountain, in which the main character runs away from home and finds / steals a peregrine falcon to train in order to bring back animals for them both to eat. That book led me to explore the world of falconry and that's when "raptor" took on even more meaning to me. It didn't mean dinosaur, it meant "bird of prey."

Birds are everywhere, raptor or not, and they are a paradox to me. For how ubiquitous they are, they're also really hard to see. Sometimes they're more of a background element than anything else. They are loud and silent. They can be extremely close, but they fly away when we get close.

Two weekends ago as I was preparing for an especially daunting work week, I decided to try something new to slow down and center myself. My default is to go on a walk, but that wasn't enough. I take a lot of walks, and they're always accompanied by an audiobook in my ear. This means that my movement through space is not calming—it's intellectual and preoccupied. I needed something about this moment to be different.

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell talks about how she started bird-watching and observed that it often feels more like bird-noticing, because it's quite difficult to find the birds you want to see when you want to see them. Instead of making it an active quest, allowing the birds to reveal themselves could be the point. This gave me the inspiration for my latest experimental slow-down activity: walking to a place where I can bird-notice.

I grabbed my binoculars, put on gloves and a coat, and headed out into the brisk morning. At first, I was missing my headphones but I quickly convinced myself that this was crucial to do without them. Once I arrived at the spot I had planned out, I realized that it would be impossible to do this with voices in my ear. I looked around at the bare, winterized trees and I couldn't see anything interesting. But I could hear that birds surrounded me.

This was the first time in years that I had gone to a secluded spot and actually used more of my senses. The trees started to show me subtle movements where birds were hopping from tiny branch to tiny branch. The scurry of little talons on the dried leaves under brush alerted me to the presence of camouflaged birds. I got to the top of a hill and was enveloped in a cacophony of bird calls. It was louder than I expected, and there were robins everywhere I turned.

I’d been hoping to see something more interesting than robins, which are extremely common where I live, but this was about getting used to the idea of bird-noticing and I tried my best to resist my boredom with these birds. In my binoculars, I could watch them closely—more closely than I could normally, which I know seems obvious, but it wasn’t just about seeing more closely, it was about watching their behavior and getting to know them. I was observing that they often had little white feathers around their eyes, and finding them snagging little berries off of branches and swallowing them with a few fast lurches of their neck. The more I watched, the more I noticed, and the more I noticed, the more interesting to watch these birds became.

Two robins perched in a tree.

I came back the next week with my camera instead of binoculars, hoping to catch a different species if luck were on my side. It felt like a replay of the prior weeks's experience: exciting anticipation, then realizing I'm just gonna get a lot of pictures of robins.

After an hour, I ended my robin photo shoot and started walking back. I noticed a bird on a telephone line that looked quite different than the now very familiar silhouette of a robin. I got closer, aimed my camera and realized I was looking at a raptor.

Kestrel perched on a telephone line.

Cyborg

Bird-noticing is hard work. It demands nothing of me.

The whole experience was a battle for my mind. I kept trying to turn it into a productivity-based activity, which is the literal opposite of why I wanted to do it in the first place.

Admittedly, the camera made it even harder to keep my bird-noticing session pure. When I have a device that creates an artifact; a record of my activity, it gets harder to stay present and just be with the birds and the environment. The advantage is that it was an actual camera—not a phone—which meant that I could get a little wrapped up in my artistic impulses, but at least it couldn't distract me with social media temptations or even Google searches for species identification (not that I really needed it).

Where I hope this helps you, though, is in the noticing part of bird-noticing. Maybe birds aren't for you, but there are so many things that hide in plain sight that can become a world of wonders to explore. Being aware of our local environments is a crucial part of our humanity, and yet it rarely gets attention, at least from my experience. I walk around bustling animal activity that is unobserved because of the constant stream of noise I put through my earphones. It has made me feel even more disconnected and isolated from the real world.

A practice like a weekly bird-noticing session seems like the perfect way for me to re-engage in reality, to appreciate the life that surrounds me, and to help me calm down when stress is at an all time high. The point is to not have a point. This is anti-productive in the capitalistic hustle-culture sense. This is just for me.

Raptor has Latin roots for the concept, "to seize." The kestrel I saw at the end of bird-noticing this weekend is the smallest falcon in North America. While most of the time I feel that my attention, my time, my worries, and my preoccupations are seized by corporations, politics, and technology, my little friend has reminded me that I can seize back. I may be small, too, but I can seize control of my attention, my curiosity, my connection to the world.

If the choice is mine, I'll be a raptor.