CYBORG_ Newsletters

How Does a Squid Wear Glasses?

Jess Brown — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:36:17 +0000

My wife loves He-Man, and more specifically, the original TV cartoon—not the new Masters of the Universe movie, she’s one of the real ones. Naturally, that means she was wearing a fabulous Skeletor t-shirt the other day and someone started talking to her about it. Skeletor's skull-for-a-face helped turn the conversation a little strange, because this person started listing off the ways that human anatomy is so inspiring. God, according to this person, had given us noses so that we could wear glasses; ears so that we could hang our masks around them; earlobes so that we could wear earrings, and so on. (To explain their observation about masks, my MS treatment makes me immunocompromised, so we have to mask in public like it’s 2020.)

Now, I’m certainly not trying to make this person sound foolish. In fact, I can understand why they would come to the (incorrect) conclusion that our bodies seem well-suited to our technology, and therefore it is our bodies that are divinely designed in order to fit our tech. We sit so much with technology that it becomes a part of our environment, and usually that means we give it little thought. How often do we consider how water magically comes out of the tap or how shoving a pronged bit of metal into the wall makes our phones and computers charge?

More specifically in linking our bodies up with technology, there are some things that are so ubiquitous or often used that we may not even consider them technology anymore. Glasses or even contacts, for example, are indeed technology, but someone (like me) that has been wearing them basically their entire life may find it so mundane and part of routine that they become an extension of themselves, rather than a discrete piece of technology.

As I’ve been writing these CYBORG_ articles, researching, and generally listening to discussions about technology, I’m deeply intrigued by how often the supernatural is invoked in those conversations. It passes our lips as easily and unconsciously as the air we breathe. So when my wife told me about her conversation with this stranger, I’m fascinated that 1. God was involved in fitting us (God’s assumed creations) with technology (our assumed creations), and 2. technology was therefore at a similar level of God (we are intentionally made to fit into tech, lower creatures raised to something higher?).

We don’t have to look for divine design to understand glasses, though. For that we look to human-centered design.

Human-centered

Human-centered design (HCD) is a philosophy I came to understand in college. It’s an approach that prioritizes human needs, wants, and capabilities when creating or iterating on something. This means that the designs are intended to work with humans as they are. It seems so obvious and so simple that I thought it was absurd to bother naming it—we're all humans, why wouldn't we design for humans? The real world with insane deadlines, limited cash, demands from department goals or campaigns showed me why this philosophy is so radical and so rare. Sure, not every ad deserves the time it takes to deeply understand humanity's interaction with it—certainly not every product is worth exceptional design, either, like harmful, cheap, or distasteful things. But hopefully if you are involved with a product that is aligned with your values, you can engage deeply with HCD as your standard.

This approach does eventually apply to important or commonly used technology (hopefully, anyway, it's still no guarantee). In the example of eyeglasses, our current design is clearly influenced by the human wearing it. We had potentially millions of years with similar nose bridges and yet lived without corrective lenses of any kind. The first eyesight aids may well have been magnifying stones/spheres set atop a surface, eventually changing into handheld eyepieces, then into various designs to fit the lenses to the face. Following it further, we eventually figured out how to put the lens on the eye itself, and for a lucky population, fix the eye with laser surgery.

The history of glasses isn't about humans becoming more fit for the current iteration of corrective lenses, rather the slow improvement of technology to make eyeglasses more tenable for humans. Who knows if there is a better design than the glasses we are currently familiar with?

It often feels like things are the way they are now because it's supposed to be that way—or that it's an inevitable end on the path of progress. Part of that is the flood of new tech that we are exposed to, much of which has trended towards a similar, convergent look and feel (why do we think AI can create dashboards so well? Because dashboards are all the same...). Part of that is possibly the assumption that HCD is the default. If we always assume things are designed to be clear and simple, when we are faced with things that are complex or difficult, we are more likely to put the blame on ourselves, rather than consider the failure of the design.

Don Norman, a renowned design researcher, wrote in his seminal book, The Design of Everyday Things:

I have studied people making errors—sometimes serious ones—with mechanical devices, light switches and fuses, computer operating systems and word processors, even airplanes and nuclear power plants. Invariably people feel guilty and either try to hide the error or blame themselves for "stupidity" or "clumsiness."

—page 65

As I watched people struggle with technology, it became clear that the difficulties were caused by the technology, not the people.

—page 7

In reality, as Norman explores further, issues, errors, and the frustration with technology isn't a problem with the individual, it's a lack of human-centered design (or something that hasn't been worked out yet in the design process).

The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That's why we blame others and even ourselves. ...But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.

—page 66

This is just my personal take, but I wonder if this deep complexity and frequent experience of errors facilitates that common conclusion that technology is on par with the gods. Not only does it take someone with technical skill to adeptly manipulate technology, there is also so much abstraction that hides underlying logic or principles that technology becomes inscrutable like a god might seem. It actually seems very logical for a non-technical person to see glasses or any other tech as something coming from the gods, and our bodies needing to become fit for the tech, because commonly, gods require us to change our nature to fit their expectations.

As a technical person seeing this, I feel the responsibility to help fit technology to humanity. I may not be able to help reveal all of the secrets of programming to uninterested people, but I can at least make sure I do my best to relieve some of the stress people feel to change their nature to match the technology.

Eyeglasses on Squids

One of the fun exercises that can help break out of the assumption of technology as a one-way path toward a specific end is trying to design something for a different species—non-human–centered design, if you will. For example, how would a squid wear glasses? If a squid could create the technology to improve or correct its eyesight, why would we ever think it would come up with a design like human glasses? It doesn't have a nose to rest it on, nor does the design make any sense for its ocean environment. Contacts are also out, since they so easily slide off of the eyeball in water. What other options are there for attaching a lens in a way that is comfortable and useful to a squid?

If you want to take this to the next level, you can do what Art Director Tim Browning and his team did in the design process for developing alien technology ideas for the film Project Hail Mary. They started by trying to understand how Rocky, the alien life-form that roughly looks like a stone spider, would manufacture its items. The alien body doesn't have fingers, so the designers came up with an idea that perhaps the species has figured out a way to wear a device on the bottom of its limbs, which would act like alien 3D printer pens, allowing Rocky to "knit" or weave together strands of material to create more technology.

3D printer prototype worn on fingers to resemble how Rocky might have worn them on its limbs. Credit: Adam Savage's Tested, How Rocky's Models Were Made for Project Hail Mary, timestamp 2:35

While we can't avoid human-centered design in some ways because of our bodies, senses, and minds, we can practice thinking about how another species could design their own technology assuming the possibility. I think this a great way to remind ourselves that we are also in the middle of a vast amount of abstraction. You can't just start with some technology, because it is built upon previous discovery, knowledge, application, manufacturing, and any number of hidden steps previously taken—all of which are directly informed by our own bodies.

We may be tempted in this digital age to figuratively leave our bodies. We may even develop some disdain for our bodies because they may fail us more often than it seems like technology fails us. Poorly designed or not, all of our technology (so far) is directly linked to our humanity, which includes our bodies, and if we don't prioritize our humanity, the technology will slip out of its usefulness and become a burden (best-case scenario) or a harmful detriment.

AI Replaces Humanities

Jess Brown — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:33:26 +0000

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is supposed to be the thing that sets humans free. Free to do what? What matters. To be more creative—and stop focusing on that boring tedium that makes up 99% of our knowledge-based jobs. It's a promise I used to proclaim about my own work using classical programming to automate things like removing unintended linebreaks in the middle of paragraphs when copying text from a poorly formatted PDF into HTML. Ain't nobody got time for hitting backspace 4,000 times per PDF.

And yet, what great spike in creativity have we seen come out of AI or AI-aided products? I tend to see more offloading—having the AI just do everything—rather than reclaiming time and space for creativity. To move past my anecdotal experience, we can take a look at what universities are doing to see what the smartest people are predicting about AI impact and creative fields like the humanities. (To be fair, the administrators of university programs may not be the smartest, but that's not my expertise to say either way...)

Consider the following tiny slice of news headlines:

‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities
China's Universities Cut 12,000 'Obsolete' Degrees Amid Race to Embrace AI Era (Aggregated news)
University in talks to cut about 150 staff (University of Exeter)

It is clear to me that over the last few years, and picking up pace right now, the humanities are under attack. Universities are scrambling to cut out "redundancy" and remove "obsolete degrees." In the case of University of Exeter:

[A spokesperson for the University of Exeter's University College Union] added that although staff across the academic body were impacted, the cuts were "disproportionately concentrated in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), where 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy (445 out of 523 FTE) are based".

Just on the face alone, the idea of losing humanities because of AI sure feels ironic, but I think it also indicates the short-sightedness of the systems supporting higher education, including the public's perception of education and AI.

Irony of Ironies

Probably due to the huge amounts of push-back that AI is getting lately, companies market their AI-powered products as being a copilot or as something that keeps a "human in the loop." AI won't replace you, because you humans are so important. Or something like that. So we have marketing from corporations saying that humans are valuable, but colleges and universities are gutting humanities programs. It's like we're getting squeezed in the middle, and the more we're squished, the harder it is to see how we're actually that important or valued or that we even have a future to look toward.

For sure, things have been changing about the college-to-job pathway for a long time. Even when I was in college almost 20 years ago, it was clear that the days of choosing a major, getting a job based on that major, and working at that same place for 30 years was the tale of past generations. As Vincent Zhao said for the South China Morning Post, “The old path – where you study one specific major, find a perfectly matched job, and stay in it stably for a lifetime – simply does not exist any more” (Yang).

I completely agree with Zhao above. I went into the Graphic Design major expecting to become a graphic designer, couldn't find a job no matter how strong my portfolio was, and ended up a developer because everyone said, "You know HTML? That's what we need." It's not like I'm some great designer, but my experience reflects the same priorities of selecting tech over "art."

However, I think it's still missing the mark to assume that college should be setting you up for some kind of life-long track that you simply follow. That's the tension that plagues academia: what is the purpose of universities? Is it to get people into jobs? Or is it to educate and refine critical thinking skills (among other skills)?

AI muddies the waters further: Is AI supposed to augment human thinking? Or take it away? Is removing the humanities supposed to support more people now that AI fills in the gaps? Or is it removing the support beams?

More fundamentally, however, the state of the humanities and liberal arts reveals a widening conflict over the “value” of higher education – with increasingly corporatized universities favoring market-driven metrics for evaluation, and proponents of humanistic education stressing that its worth to both individuals and society at large cannot be measured that way. (Speri)

It's a very common perception to assume that because the humanities have no measurable value the way that tech, science, and business fields do, that the humanities have little to offer other than in politics or other "soft" applications. This is actually the opposite of what Marshall McLuhan argued in his essay, The Humanities in the Electronic Age, originally published in 1961. McLuhan saw the humanities as a critical path to building and improving the business world, including management. He optimistically states:

Just as business is discovering that higher and higher education is needed for the ever enlarging jobs of management, so the adult community in general has become aware of the life of learning as natural and delightful and as necessarily extended throughout adult life. (McLuhan, 16)

Not only does he continuously suggest that business benefits from the humanities (and especially the well-rounded, thoughtful leader), McLuhan goes so far as to suggest the artist is critical to the engineer and to solving problems. How ironic, indeed, that we are apparently racing to throw out the arts, social sciences, and other "soft" fields of study, just because AI can generate titles and summaries and thumbnails and video clips.

The humanist will observe, however, that no matter what period or technology is in question, the artist has always solved the new problem both for the engineer and for the human community, by his new advance models for sensibility and awareness. ... The ever new models of the artist are for the correction of the perceptual bias inflicted upon any human community by ever new technology. In the past century, indeed, we have come to rely almost wholly on art for the nutrition of fresh impulse and the alerting of hypnotized senses. No previous society ever regarded art this way. But no previous society ever underwent the successive brain-washings and hypnotic trances that ours has done from a succession of new technologies. (McLuhan, 10-11)

Instead of seeing humanities as being a part of the progress of technology, we often pit them against each other, as though art and science are oppositionally destructive. McLuhan has taught us before that the artist and their art help to reveal the invisible environment that surrounds us. The things we miss because we've become accustomed to them can be examined or seen in new light because of the arts (and social sciences). We can critique systems because of the humanities, we can ask if we're asking the right questions because of philosophy and art, we can remember our humanity even after being plugged in digitally all day because of poetry.

Even in the extremely practical sense, I can back up what McLuhan says in the workplace about how the artists help us engineers—and it's not just about type treatments and whitespace. The artists or designers or creative-thinkers help us all solve problems in collaboration. We all see different pieces to the problem and we all create something together that would be impossible otherwise.

Instead, we say things like "product designers are obsolete now" because AI can also draw pretty interfaces. Are they the right interfaces? Do they solve the problem? Impossible to know, because the people with the wisdom to determine rightness, appropriateness, and fitness are swapped for a machine that gives you a most likely answer.

Although contradictory to McLuhan's view that the arts support even the corporate model, Adam Rzepka, a professor of English at Montclair State, explains the ultimate problem of diminishing the already feeble hold of humanities in higher education:

“The humanities simply don’t fit a corporate model because they are just not monetizable in the same way the sciences or even the social sciences are,” he added. “And the deeper reason they’re coming under attack is that free thought and rigorous, free inquiry is dangerous to executive power.” (Speri)

That's the real concern. It's not that artists/humanists aren't valuable or important. It's that they're dangerous. They challenge the assumptions of man and machine. They ask the questions that businessmen don't want to ask: should we even be doing this?

If AI is the excuse for threatening and replacing the humanities, I suspect what's really going on is that the humanities have threatened AI—among other powerful systems at play right now. What does that tell us? To go where they don't want us to go. To invest in the humanities however you can: learning about them, investing in them, advocating for them. We can't directly control university decisions, but we can help remind the public why the humanities are so important.

Works Cited

McLuhan, Marshall. 1961. "The Humanities in the Electronic Age." In Marshall McLuhan Unbound, edited by Eric McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, 10–16. Gingko Press.

Speri, Alice. 2026. "‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities." The Guardian, January 20, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/universities-humanities-programs.

Zeltmann, Britta. 2026. "University in talks to cut about 150 staff" BBC, June 23, 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2djnz3y47o

Yang, Carol. 2026. "China’s universities cut 12,000 ‘obsolete’ degrees amid race to embrace AI era." South China Morning Post, June 14, 2026. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3356913/chinas-universities-cut-12000-obsolete-degrees-amid-race-embrace-ai-era

The VampAIre Problem

Jess Brown — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:27:13 +0000

"Is someone there?" Mr. Giles, the librarian asks while looking through books. He turns to look at a glass cabinet and catches his reflection. No one around him. He looks toward what he is sure is empty space to his side and gasps in fright as Angel, the vampire with a soul, stares at him blankly.

Giles turns back to the glass, consoling himself intellectually, saying:

"A vampire casts no reflection."

For at least 129 years since Bram Stoker's Dracula, vampires' missing reflections have been a consistent feature of this night-time creature, and I finally realized why this is such a great part of the lore: they can't see themselves!

Ok, that sounds pointlessly obvious but I think it applies directly to how we can better understand AI, empathy, and vampires. First, I want to lay some groundwork for how I am approaching monstrosity and humanity here. I think that monsters and monster stories are some of the most important stories we humans tell, but it's easy to get lost in the tension of reality and fantasy (focusing too much on the monster as either biological discovery or fantastic curiosity). Even worse, we can wield monster stories to turn actual humans into monsters for the purpose of domination, oppression, control, and/or power.

I can't make the case that all monsters are just misunderstood, nor can I say that there is not monstrosity to be found in humanity. If anything, it's dangerous to draw conclusions about monsters and humans that try to define clear lines between the two, especially if it trains us to dehumanize real people who are different than us. Monsters are supposed to be uncomfortable (and usually uncomfortably similar to us), they are supposed to play in the margins or in the fuzzy spaces where categories and simple explanations fail. That's what makes monstrosity so useful: it creates space for us to explore, to question, and to wonder.

Mirror, Mirror

Mirrors alone are mystical or symbolic to us humans. They're "windows into the soul" in one context and represent vanity, foolishness, and shallowness in another. Combine them with vampires and you've got a whole bunch of topics to ponder: pride, souls, desire, emptiness, death, etc. In a meta-sort of way, monsters can be helpful because they separate what in reality is one thing (humanity) into two things (humanity and monstrosity). The separation allows us to examine what is harder to see within ourselves, acting as a mirror to provide the reflective space to see what we can't see without it.

I'll borrow a little bit from Buffy The Vampire Slayer for how to think of vampires, since it still pretty well captures the current concept of these creatures of the night. In Buffy, vampires look like the humans that were killed and turned by other vamps, but they explicitly state that the person is gone and there is now a demon inside the body. So even if your friend gets turned into a vampire, they have the memories and the looks of the person you once knew, that person is gone. It's not just a matter of a monstrous side coming out that was inherent to the person—the monster is not the human and vice versa.

The TV spin-off series, Angel, further cements this idea because the eponymous character, Angel, is a vampire with a restored soul and when his soul is magically removed on occasion, the demon Angelus regains control of the body, as though the human soul and the demon both inhabit the body now. The soul takes precedence, but once it is gone (or suppressed by some external force/substance), the vampire—a separate entity—is now operating again.

Vampires are so close to the humans they inhabit, and yet they have no reflection. It's almost as if the soul is what is reflected: no soul, no reflection. But what if we take it further? What if we are the reflection of the vampire? Or, perhaps, the vampire is the reflection of us? Mirrors are just a stand-in for the concept of seeing that which is similar, but not the actual thing itself. My reflection isn't actually me, but it looks just like me.

Mirrors are still useful—I can make observations, gather data, and ask introspective questions with its help. Even so, the mirror is not a replacement for me. With no body, no social connection, the mirror is ultimately powerless in satisfying human needs. It isn't human or humanity.

VampAIre

If the vampire is the reflection of humanity, then it makes sense that it couldn't see itself in a mirror, because it's only apparent in the context of other humans. While no humans really are monsters, we are absolutely capable of monstrosity. It is uncanny to know a person and to also know of their actions, especially when those actions are harmful, cruel, and/or heartless, as though we are encountering their reflection. It can be hard to reconcile the monstrous behavior with the humanity they have. Outside of story, the reality is that our humanity encapsulates our monstrosity—there is no separate entity to blame.

In a way, artificial intelligence (AI) also works the same way as our vampires. AI is not "alive" nor is it "conscious," but even if we were so generous as to assume it were, AI would not be able to see its reflection either. AI is the reflection of us. It does not have humanity in itself because it is a fundamentally different being. It may be able to communicate with us, it may have our "memories" in the form of its training data, it may even have agency and goals and desires, but it is not human, because it isn't human.

Not being human is not an insult, it's an important distinction for our own safety. If we start seeing the reflection as if it were human, then we are deceived and we are opened up to all kinds of dangers; physical, emotional, mental, financial, and on and on.

AI is the reflection of its creators and trainers. It is the reflection of the person who prompts it. It appears in the form of humanity because it presents text, speech, images, videos, sounds, as if a human did it/made it. It responds to our questions and requests in ways that we can understand. However, it lacks the empathy and the social connection that would make it even more human-like. AI cannot foresee the impact of its production; it cannot feel the weight of the lives lost to its influence or the changes in the environment of the physical world. It cannot care like a human, because it is not embodied; it is not biologically nor psycho-socially connected to us. It's a reflection; abstracted, but similar enough to fool someone passing by.

While vampires are generally imminent threats to humans, Buffy explores options where vampires team up with humans against greater evil or for "aligned goals." AI does not feed off of human life, nor is it intentionally designed to be a predator (we hope, anyway). The real monstrosity of AI is in its categorically transgressive nature: it feels like interacting with a human, but it is not human. It is neither inherently malevolent nor benevolent, but it is also not neutral (it's a trickster)—it amplifies and distorts regardless of intention from either AI or its operator. Since AI inhabits this other fuzzy space, we have to accept the complexity of it, including the new work it demands of us to introspect, to examine, and to wonder about how we are teaming up with it.

Because AI can't look in a mirror to see its reflection, we have the duty to do so instead. What do we see as a consequence of our actions with AI? What are the impacts to our culture? What is AI doing to positively or negatively impact our children, our families, our coworkers, our satisfaction in life, our futures, our conflicts, our humanity?

Recording In Progress

Jess Brown — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:58:03 +0000

One of the most stressful assignments in a film photography class is the pinhole camera segment. It's a common exercise where you build the camera and then experiment with it to capture photos and develop the image.

My mom saved a cookie tin for me from among the neighborhood Christmas treats she received. After spraying the inside with matte-black spray paint and punching a small hole in the bottom, my camera was ready. In the dark room, I loaded up the makeshift camera with photopaper then left to find an interesting scene nearby to photograph. The tiny hole was covered in electrical tape so that the light wouldn't leak in until I wanted to take the photo.

I found a weird alcove of the art building with shards of pottery all over the ground (it was either the remains of a kiln-firing gone very wrong or it was a postmodern piece examining the effect of art on society). This was surely going to be my masterpiece!

...Well, in my defense, there's no way to focus the pinhole, so you kinda get what you get—and don't be expecting some kind of beautiful, shallow-depth-of-field bokeh-riddled close-up, that's not going to happen with this setup.

This assignment seems to get more stressful as time goes by because from the first time I made a pinhole camera as a teenager to the one I made in college, digital cameras became affordable to the masses, film photography became obsolete among even the hardcore scrapbookers, and the newly ubiquitous digital camera melded into the smartphone and started disappearing altogether. This wild appearance and disappearance of photographic technology meant that within only a few years, my personal expectations of the tech changed drastically.

Digital cameras could do what film cameras (and especially pinhole cameras) could not: give you instant feedback. You had a preview of what your camera was going to produce after snapping the photo. You could review what you captured while still standing in the same place! Digital also started lending a helping hand with auto-focus settings and a few other neat dials and buttons to tweak the kind of output you were looking for. It also doubled, tripled, or eventually infinitely expanded the number of photos you could take, depending on the memory card or built-in storage available.

Contrasted to the pinhole camera, which had a capacity to take one photo per trip to the darkroom (you can't reload it on the fly because the light will destroy whatever you had as well as the new photopaper you would be replacing), how can we even deal with this thing?! It doesn't focus, it doesn't help you compose the shot, it is vulnerable, and you can even do everything right and then ruin it in the dark room during development.

Then again, when I stopped stressing about making the photo turn out the way digital photos did, there were some really cool results:

It seems like as digital photography became easier, cheaper, and more accessible, the quality of my photos sharply declined with that increase of quantity. It's to the point that all of the photos on my phone are basically worthless—certainly in artistic value. They're quick snaps of paragraphs in books that I'll never go back and read; or they're little things I wanted to document. Even when I try really hard to compose my shot, I never go back to review them and I never use them (except in CYBORG_ articles).

I haven't touched film photography in a very long time, so I've lost the skills I used to know well about exposure and shutter speed settings. All of the experimentation-mindset is lost. It's certainly a me-problem, but technology is not without its part in this degradation. In a way it's following the fundamental law of economics: tons of supply + low demand = cheap, cheap, cheap.

Constraints Are Everything

The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.

—Socrates, "Phaedrus." Quote from The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan and Queintin Fiore, 1967, pg 113

You could insert any technology into Socrates's critique, because all technology abstracts skills and knowledge in order to make something easier, even if only slightly easier. For example, photographs have all kinds of applications: they can be art, they can be aids in documenting history, they can be nostalgic reminders of moments gone by. All of these require some skills—primarily for operating the camera—and as technology continued to improve the camera, we abstracted a lot of those operational skills. Our current smartphones auto-adjust the exposure, detect human faces, attempt to focus on what we most likely want in focus. We have offloaded or "[trusted] to the external" all of those technical skills to the phone camera.

Not to say no one is an artist with their phone camera, but the massive majority of people are not applying the rules of composition and visual design when they take pictures with their phones. If there's something cool they want to capture, there is no penalty for taking a whole bunch of random snaps, because there's little to no cost for each press of the button—no limits to storage, no work needed to develop, nothing to do with images after.

Again, while I am generalizing here, when I see people visiting museums or going to other experiences like a beautiful overlook of a canyon or even going to a concert, I also see the behavior of cheap experiences. If you drive to a canyon, get out of the car, look at the scene through your phone, snapping pictures all the while, then get back in and drive away, did you even see what you were looking at? You "appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing" of what you just experienced. I'm guilty of this. I've gone places and instead of soaking in the experience, knowing this is the only time in my life I'll be there, I waste a majority of the time making sure I "document" everything I see.

It is extremely nice and useful to have a phone camera. It's been a tool for social justice and in checking authority, such as in cases of police brutality. It's convenient to be able to capture mundane things that may be deeply meaningful later, such as moments with loved ones who have now passed on. I'm not at all trying to say that we abandon our phone cameras, but I do think that the ease and abstraction has a cost. What we lose is often what we think we are gaining: memory and experience. Instead of capturing a moment in embodied memory, we put it in our phone. Instead of listening to understand, we offload it to the recording on our phone (or AI or whatever other tech). Instead of feeling, we skip over the breathtaking moments to make sure we get the snap, then move on to the next thing.

While we don't need pinhole cameras to help us appreciate the world around us, we do need constraints, and knowing the cost might help us to remember to introduce that friction and that difficulty. Accepting the loss of digital documentation could be the motivation we need to put that experience back into our own minds and bodies.

I think it's extremely important to not lose touch with our embodied experiences. I know what it's like to temporarily lose my sense of taste, my coordination, my ability to think due to my MS attack, and I find it eerily similar in some ways to be diverting our tactile and visceral experiences into second-hand digital ones. Looking at a canyon through the screen of a phone is the same as eating strawberries without being able to taste them. Taking a picture of a memorial and the plaque explaining its significance is nothing like being present, becoming empathetically involved, feeling the weight of human loss or sacrifice, and being moved by it.

Our bodies may be imperfect; our memories are imperfect; but they are real and transformational. Our minds are already in a state of "recording in progress," as we take in our day and the information we encounter, and we even have automated processes that help us sort through what is important and what isn't. At least for me, I've noticed that the more I trust myself and my body to capture and record, the less I need to record digitally. A few, well-planned, intentional digital artifacts are plenty to remind me of what happened and that small, incomplete digital representation prompts my body to revisit the smells, sights, or textures of the experience.

Dinosaurs Eat Man...

Jess Brown — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:40:42 +0000

I think I found a paradox. You've probably heard your favorite creator on whichever social media platform say something like, "Like and subscribe, it helps to please the algorithm gods." This is a joke I've heard frequently on YouTube for many years now. It's not a signal of a new religion forming (yet?), and it's not intended to be taken literally (yet?), but I do think it demonstrates the intuitive thinking we humans tend toward when dealing with the world that is outside of our control.

Despite all of their efforts to succeed online as content creators, we all know there is still luck at play, as well as "The Algorithm" which is the governing body of distribution. If The Algorithm doesn't determine your content worthy of its awaiting viewers, then your reach is cut very short. Since the rules frequently change without our input, it's almost as if The Algorithm is taking a godlike role: it has its own inscrutable ways, goals, and means of blessing—and you have to "please" it to gain favor for those blessings.

The paradox we'll examine, however, is where this gets applicable to our lives with technology, because I think it explains the bigger system surrounding us that gets expressed through the AI-powered technology we use.

Note: In this article I won't continue to distinguish between algorithms, LLMs, and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) because I feel it's unnecessary for today's topic. There is a difference between AI and artificial general intelligence (AGI), but we'll get to that later.

Creation

Gods are beings who bring beings into being, particularly the beings calling them gods. Many cultures have understood the origins of humanity as involving making humans out of other beings and substances. The beings doing the making are, by definition, referred to as gods. Creation is by definition an act of monster-making—of making something unprecedented, a type of being beyond existing categories of beings...In that sense, divinity and humanity are each other's monsters.

—Humans: A Monstrous History, Surekha Davies, 2025. Pages 161–162

As Davies just delineated, a god is usually a creator of beings. If we pull AI into the mix, we get a really weird creation story if we look at it without the lens of personal religious beliefs. The story is "supposed" to be: god(s) create humans who then serve god(s). Therefore the creator should expect some kind of benefit from its creations (i.e. humans create AI which should serve human needs and wants).

Whoops, that's the wrong chart. Here's the right one:

The creation chain describes who creates whom, but the service chain describes who serves whom—and it seems to be the opposite of what's expected.

This is the paradox I see: we're told that AI is for our benefit. It's our creation of an unprecedented "being" that will help us "focus on what matters most" or that will bring knowledge and skill to everyone ("anyone can be a programmer"). And yet it sure feels like we are serving AI more and more. Creators change their behaviors to "please the algorithm" and even complain that they have to make certain kinds of videos because that's how they sustain their content-based business. AI-created content changes our behaviors as we give up on the cognitive drain it takes to discern if what we're seeing is real or fake. Abilities, knowledge, and skills deteriorate as AI assistants do the work we used to do—the kind of work that helped us develop better critical thinking and deep-work/flow sessions.

But maybe this is all indicative of the larger picture. AI overlords are just the middlemen now—who's at the top? It's the same suspects that were there before: ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations whose goals are to extract, distract, and exploit until there's nothing left at all. The top .0-whatever-1% don't use or need AI the way they have caused the rest of us to use or need AI, because we're trapped in a game where we are told what our goals are and what we have to do to achieve them—no questions allowed, nothing outside the average, AI-supplied ideas. Bow down or be destroyed.

Godly Irony

What's weird is that there are people in Silicon Valley that really do think that they can build a god (AGI). I doubt they see it in spiritual terms—it seems like it's more egotistical: to build something so much smarter than you so that you can see what that's like. (By the way, this is something that has been brought up multiple times on the podcast Your Undivided Attention, which is something I find fascinating and utterly creepy. For example: The Race to Build God: AI's Existential Gamble)

This sentiment is even captured in Alien Earth, the 2025 TV series, as trillionaire twenty-something, Boy Kavalier, says:

"It's not about money. People always think it's about money with trillionaires. Or ego. But you know, y-you know what I really want? I want to talk to somebody smarter than me."

While this obviously isn't a primary source/reference for this kind of thinking, once it's showing up in popular media, you know we're in trouble.

In a conversation about AI with my friend who's a university librarian, she noted something that has haunted me for several years. Her team got together to try and work on how to help students use AI and the library more effectively and part of their deliberation was to try and figure out "what literature tells us about humans creating intelligent beings." They are librarians after all! Several intense book club meetings in, my friend summarized what they found literature has to say, and it tends to be a warning.

Maybe we really did need that “God creates dinosaurs” quote from Jurassic Park after all, because in our pursuit to build a god (or to assume the role of god ourselves), we are technically creating monsters. Amidst the many stories that have been told, we see the pattern that when humans create a form of intelligence or a new being, we easily and quickly lose control. We (re-)create dinosaurs, and then we’re surprised that these creatures would make decisions that we don’t want them to make. We destroy gods only to create new ones.

There is one more pattern in these stories, however, that perhaps goes unexamined more often than not. We get fixated on the act of creation, because it’s a spectacle, but let’s pull back the curtain: who is doing the creation? Powerful individuals and / or small groups. Jurassic Park was built by a wealthy white man; Frankenstein created his monster in his obsession-driven laboratory; AGI is being pursued by elite data scientists and developers. Who’s missing from these acts of creation? Literally everyone else. No involvement of the public or those who will have to interact with the “creatures” at some point. No informed consent. God-makers are the ones in power who create gods in their own image and then expect the rest of us to pay our respects to their gods (a.k.a. to them). What would a collaborative creation look like in contrast to the typical creation act? Is that even possible?

Either way, we are creating new beings that are category breakers (monsters), and we will have to examine how these beings engage with us and how we will engage with them. Hopefully, we haven't just created "dinosaurs," and instead have a more cooperative monster to deal with.

What You Need

Jess Brown — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:39:34 +0000

Fred Renard is a washed up failure sitting at a bar one night. He sees an old man, Pidott, selling odds and ends to people in the small bar. While he watches the old man shuffle around to the three or four other people in the room, Renard notices something strange about this salesman: Pidott somehow knows exactly what people really need—at least, that's the claim about his reputation.

In this episode of The Twilight Zone, the salesman starts talking to a woman, letting her browse through his briefcase of what, to me, looks like the junk drawer in my kitchen. He stops her and peers into her eyes for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then says, "I know what you need." He gives her a bottle of all-purpose spot remover (how sexist of him, I think as I watch). He does the same ritual with a man at the counter who's downtrodden because an injury has forced him out of his professional baseball career. The item this man needed? Bus tickets to Scranton, Pennsylvania.

A call comes out of nowhere for the injured ex-baseball player (truly out of nowhere, since the call is coming from inside the bar at the payphone...). He hangs up and announces to the tiny group of people at the bar that he was offered a coaching job in, whaddaya know: Scranton, Pennsylvania. After a momentary celebration he's back down in the dumps because his shoddy suit would surely go against his new prospective job—luckily that lady has a spot remover and she quickly maneuvers to help clean up his clothes. I guess that's how straight people met each other in the '50s, because it's subtly implied that these two must be destined for a relationship with each other—why else would the salesman have orchestrated all of this?

Renard has been watching all of this play out and you can see the wheels turning as he realizes the salesman's talent is real. He catches up with the old man and demands to get what he really needs. Pidott obliges and gives him a pair of scissors. Disappointed and miffed, Renard puts the scissors in his coat pocket, fixes his scarf and goes home. He steps into the elevator to get up to his apartment when suddenly the scarf begins choking him as it got caught in the elevator door. Renard avoids this "Final Destination" style death by pulling out the scissors and cutting the scarf off of his throat.

Up to this point, I was unconvinced of the salesman's promise of knowing what you need. The whole bus ticket/spot remover thing sure seemed to prioritize the baseball-man's "needs" after all (I know that's my feminism talking and that the lady probably had no options available to her outside of the dude), but the scissors saving Renard's life—now that's connecting the dots better for me. So we have a salesman who can discern needs and provide the solution through random items, and we have Renard, who's a schemer and someone who will take the shorter, sooner method to get what he wants. Naturally, Renard goes back and demands that Pidott help him some more.

I think this is where we start to see this episode turn into a fable that we can use to examine our relationship with technology and especially the promises wrapping around technology. To some degree, we all pursue rewards or results using the path of least resistance, so when we discover a prediction machine that sure seems to work reliably in getting us what we want—or need—then how could we not be tempted to extract all of the use from this machine as possible?

Pidott breaks his policy of one need per customer and gives Renard a leaky pen, which drops a single blot of ink onto a newspaper with the line-up of horses for the next day's horse race. Because Renard is already primed to assume that Pidott will be providing something he needs, Renard places a good bet on the horse. This is exactly what people start to do with AI from what I can tell. We test it a little and as we see results that appear to be legitimate or correct, we start to trust it.

Story Power

What's even more concerning about this Twilight Zone episode is the story that sets up Pidott's ability. As far as we know, he just got lucky with the bus tickets and everything else has been people's creativity in finding a meaning and a use for the trinket they were given. There were always other solutions to every situation we've seen so far—even the scarf in the elevator (just turn your body next time, Renard, if you stay stiff, you're the one keeping the tension...). When the ink blot falls on a horse's name, it is the story of Pidott knowing what you need that causes Renard to decide that must mean he should bet on that horse. Luck happens to strike again and the horse brings Renard $240 (probably something like $3,000 in today's money). This only serves to reinforce Renard's assumption that the story that he has in his mind is true.

To be clear, the Twilight Zone never suggests that the power to perceive needs isn't real and instead further insists that the salesman's gift is real and accurate. Either way, the conclusion to the story takes a tragic turn when Renard, in his greed, comes at Pidott insisting that he help him again (the lucky, leaky pen is totally dry after the one horse "prediction"). Pidott objects, saying that what Renard needs is something he can't supply, namely serenity, peace of mind, humor, and the ability to laugh at oneself. Renard ignores the old man's ramblings and instead fixates on the briefcase as Pidott steals a glance at it. Convinced that the salesman accidentally gave up the item he needs, Renard takes a pair of shoes that are too small and slippery from the case.

Pidott packs up and crosses the street, puddles splashing all over the road with the night-time rain. Renard is busy smashing his feet into the small shoes, muttering about how he must have to put the shoes on and walk somewhere, then the need will be revealed—that's how it works! The cramped feet make him angry and he abandons his plan to figure out the meaning behind the shoes and starts to pursue Pidott, only to slip on a puddle and get hit by a car.

Upon Renard's death, Pidott monologues to the camera about how the shoes weren't what Renard needed, but what Pidott needed, since he saw a vision of Renard killing the old man eventually. I still only see self-fulfilling prophecies as a result of the story around the power. Similarly with technology, we have powerful stories that surround dangerous machines and systems. Stories told by salesmen are often particularly potent, they're gonna be good at their job after all, so of course it seems like clarity when their software or their AI product will solve your problems—even be exactly what you need.

Cyborg

Protecting human agency is a huge concern for me as I've been exploring humanity's interaction with technology. Technology can interrupt our agency, whether because we offload it to the tech or because it slowly it eats away like acid. Usually the slower loss of agency comes through systemic design, which I still define as technology: racism, classism, nationalism, etc. What's interesting to me is that these kinds of technologies (a.k.a. applications of knowledge) always come wrapped in a story, just like Pidott's ability. That story is often what perpetuates oppression and the loss of agency, because stories are powerful to us.

Consider racism as we understand it today (as having to do with skin color). This is a part of the story that lingers unexamined.

Turning the concept of "race" into a question of skin color beings with medieval Europeans, and in large part precisely to rationalize and authorize European imperialism and the enslavement of non-European peoples through the notion that European "races" and the resulting cultures were superior and therefore had a right to be in charge. —The Bible Says So, Dan McClellan, page 65

Race was a construct, made with intent to accomplish the agenda of Christian Europeans at the time. Now, I'm not saying racism doesn't exist because race is just made up—it absolutely exists because we keep telling ourselves stories that belittle, exclude, disadvantage, deprioritize, and harm people of color, even (sometimes) unintentionally.

The problem with stories, especially when they become intertwined with mystical or religious beliefs is that they become precious to us and can further encourage us to protect oppression and loss of agency—even when it harms ourselves!

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which since 1973 had secured federal protection of legal access to abortion prior to twenty weeks. When Roe v. Wade was first decided, evangelical leaders around the nation condoned or even endorsed the ruling, but that would change before the 1970s were over. Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and others would spend the next several years traveling around the country and ginning up outrage among evangelicals about the practice of abortion. Scholars have unearthed documentation that seems to indicate the purpose of their campaign was at least initially to galvanize a movement of right-wing religious folks that would be become politically powerful and would help them put pressure on the government to stop it from forcing evangelical universities to admit Black students.

A big part of this campaign was making the case that a Bible-believing Christian couldn't possibly tolerate the practice of abortion. —The Bible Says So, page 91

When we don't know or recognize the story, it's easy to be convinced that things have just always been a certain way. Technology can be used overtly, with intention, to create circumstances that we, the unknowing participants, will find ways to support by connecting the dots that we are given.

What You Need, may not be about digital technology, but it is about the oldest technology we have: story. We humans want to see meaning, we want to connect the dots, but so many times the stories and the dots we are given are barely sufficient to stand on their own. It is easy to be persuaded by beautiful stories and convincing rhetoric, and when we're convinced, we'll start looking for ways to further confirm our conclusion, just like Renard did. To move through the world this way puts us and others in peril.

Urgency without the Infrastructure

Jess Brown — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:36:42 +0000

A little while ago, I saw someone post a Tweet that said something to the effect of, "In our haste to adopt AI, we created the urgency without the infrastructure." Naturally, the rest of the post was a tech bro showcase of how they "solved it" with standardized agents or whatever else, but it was the idea of urgency without infrastructure that I found to be a crucial observation.

This is especially pertinent given that I feel this viscerally now at work. The pressure is mounting, the deadlines are shorter, and the expectations are higher.

But is anything actually improving?

Speed is every business's favorite vector to try to increase. Gotta get more numbers earlier. Gotta push twice the code in a day. Gotta produce more images than will ever be used in a few hours. Speed is also the most dangerous—and despite the old entrepreneur's mantra of "greater risk, greater reward," I don't think that tracks onto speed as often as we're told to think. Speed should be applied at appropriate times, and not often (in my opinion) so as to reduce the risk of crashing in all possible ways.

Urgency puts pressure on people to apply more speed, and that always entails cutting corners—whether it's not fully finishing pieces or not being as careful as usual. Since AI is our massive multiplier in all systems right now—as well as the pressure to adopt, implement, and use AI—many of us are faced with this conundrum of urgency without infrastructure, so we lean on AI to fill in the gaps. AI increases expectations, AI is used in an attempt to fulfill them.

What then, is infrastructure? Guardrails, red tape, processes, strategy, methodology, design. It's not just setting up AI-agent skills and prompt libraries. It's doubling down on the emphasis of quality. It's insisting on breaks, on regulations, on reviews, on thoughtful action.

"Haste makes waste," my wife always says when she notices that she's rushing. This is an adage she learned while working at McDonald's, the business that is the classic case study in process and strategy that enables a huge volume of people to be served in very short periods of time—consistently. I think this applies to even more situations now, not just employee productivity or efficient processes. The public calls it "AI slop" when we see pointless, incorrect, deceptive, or ridiculous content produced by AI—waste indeed—created by the haste to pump out more content for social media algorithms (AI content for AI judgment and distribution). It is only thoughtful, intentional intervention that can slow things down.

I'm exhausted this week since there was no week-end for me at work, so it's a very short article today. The only thing keeping me going is the excitement of the new album from Evanescence in the next few days ;)

But I really think this is critical to think about. If you're able to advocate for more strategy do it. If you're able to draw boundaries about how much work you can ethically do even with AI, you should do it now—with relentless advocacy for yourself and your teammates—because slowing down is not what society is choosing for us right now, and that's a dangerous place to be.

Change Breakers

Jess Brown — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:34:51 +0000

Growing up as a closeted queer kid in a deeply conservative faith tradition and community, I found myself frequently performing behaviors that went against my personally held values. Hindsight is 20/20, but I still remember even as a teenager doing and saying things that I didn't personally find acceptable, but felt like were required so as not to jeopardize my social safety in a group.

I was frequently offended by discussions about gay people and homosexual behavior, enough to elicit a self-righteous comment about how that was wrong or weird. And for an introvert who rarely spoke in full sentences all throughout middle school and high school, the fact that I would comment on this at all with my peers seems staggering to me now.

Over time, my desperation to be "passed over" by the destroying angel of group belonging, I did and said things that disturb me to this day. One of the worst was in college. I was still feeding myself hateful rhetoric from Ann Coulter (I know, I know) by listening to her audiobook when I was bored. I was in a special, low-credit class that was ultimately just taking turns sitting in an art exhibition room and writing a few blog posts for class assignments. One assignment was to go to a special collection that was briefly featured in my university art museum. This exhibit was about the horrors of the Japanese-American internment camps that the U.S. set up during World War II.

I was ripped to shreds with the assignment to write a response to this exhibit. Ann Coulter was telling me that the camps were a necessary protection in war time—possibly even a benefit to the imprisoned Japanese-Americans themselves (lots of mental gymnastics for that one). My humanity and the exhibit were telling me that this was inexcusable. My conservative community told me to look the other way when it came to things like this; to celebrate war because we were God’s people, and therefore war—any war—we participate in is sanctioned by God, otherwise it wouldn’t happen. We weren't racist, we were doing what was necessary for the greater good. My community also told me that if I stuck out, I would be hammered back down.

So to my deep shame, even then, I wrote a piece that derided this art exhibit. I downplayed the emotional turmoil that any person could feel for looking through the heartfelt pieces. I parroted the arguments that Coulter spoke through my earbuds so often. Patriotism, national security, war-time excuses.

I was disgusted with myself when I published the post.

Hiding from Ourselves

It's so obvious to me now, but back then, I couldn't explain my cognitive dissonance for writing that racist piece. All I see from where I am now is a scared person who was really good at hiding from myself. I put all of my identity, all of my worth, into identity markers which had been determined by a group to be the correct ones. Knowing the consequence of being too much of myself, I hid myself and instead performed and pretended in ways that escalated over time. The more I realized that I, myself, was one of the enemies that my group hated, the more I had to distance myself from myself.

"If we do debate, we tend to fall prey to what legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls the "law of group polarization," which says that groups who form because of shared attitudes tend to become more adamant and polarized over time. This is because when we wish to see ourselves as centrists but learn that others in our group take a much more extreme position, we realize that to take the middle position, we must shift our attitude in the direction of the extreme. In response, people who wish to take extreme positions must shift further in that direction to distance themselves from the center. This comparison-to-others feedback loop causes the group as a whole to become more polarized over time, and as consensus builds, individuals become less likely to contradict it." —How Minds Change, by David McRaney, page 198

If that's not exactly what we're seeing in global politics (but especially in the U.S.) right now, I don't know of a simpler way to state it. McRaney makes a case throughout his book that as humans, we change our minds all of the time, and we have evolutionarily selected behaviors, biases, and other psycho-social tools to support our collective journeys of change. If that's the case, then how do we wrap our minds around these groups that seem unchanging and rigid? How do we make sure that we're not being trapped in echo chambers or led to incorrect conclusions, when we're in this polarization motion?

First, I think it's helpful to take a look at his explanation of the science from an evolutionary standpoint. He starts by showing how we as social, yet territorial, creatures, needed a way to protect and defend our territory and social group from other competing groups. Eventually, we ended up with complex communication systems that would help us to protect ourselves, make discoveries, coordinate with each other, notice warning signs of danger, and make other observations. Note that this is my extremely simplified summary of what probably took hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. But McRaney comes to this interesting point about how our communication is ultimately supposed to work: through argumentation.

"All those individual sources of information weren't passive observers objectively recording and reporting on reality. And in such a rich information pool, with so many individuals with their own personal goals, even a trusted peer might want to deceive or mislead so they might gain at another's expense. Genes are selfish that way. Even when the intentions of a peer were good, each brain could only add to the pool what it could observe. Confounding the process further, brains are prone to making errors and may misinterpret what they attempt to pass along. Communication, no matter how useful, was bound to be imperfect." —McRaney, page 188

Since communication is imperfect, since we have to account for bad actors or at least selfish intentions, how do we ever land on some sort of truth or path forward when solving a problem? If arguments are so critical, why do they seem unproductive?

"If people just endlessly exchanged arguments with no side ever gaining any ground, no one admitting they were wrong or accepting the proposition of others, then argumentation would have long ago been tossed into the evolutionary dustbin. ... "Arguing online can seem like deliberation, but if people are insulated from essential group dynamics, from outside perspectives, then individuals will essentially argue with themselves." —McRaney, page 198

Cyborg

These little insights into the original “technology” of communication tell me that despite the seeming hopelessness of the current political situation we’ve found ourselves in, it is at least possible for things to change—for our minds to change. It also highlights how our current digital technology seems to be confusing us. Almost all "arguments" I can think of happen in fiery comment threads on social media—but this isn't the kind of argumentation we developed evolutionarily. It's a modern (probably accidental) trick. This is why our offline social groups are even more critical now, but if we're all being trained to think of argumentation as the same thing we see online for the majority of the day, our offline habits will be impacted as well.

This leads me to think that perhaps we can draw out some frameworks to evaluate our groups; some way to know if the community or ideology is worth investing in or trusting. The greatest indicator to me of how much we can trust a group is whether the group is willing to change or if they overtly proclaim to be unchanging.

The reality is that we—individually and collectively—do and will change. There are groups out there that claim to be unchanging (perhaps because their God is unchanging, or because there is some kind of unalterable Truth that their group has claimed to know). This is an illusion at best, and, to me, indicates an immaturity or even an intentional deception, because it is disingenuous. These are the kinds of groups that seem to have great influence over their adherents, but they can interrupt the processes we need to get to good, informed consensus or resolution. Or, in my case, interrupt my access to my own humanity and the humanity of others.

This isn’t exclusive to religious or political groups. I see it in the tech industry, in business, in elitist groups. That’s why I think we should be wary when we notice dogmatic insistence in any group. When we get carried away in the current of change, I hope to eventually recognize that I am changing, but the group(s) I’ve clung to in the process may or may not allow me to see that.

How terrifying to wake up one day, realizing you are nowhere near where you thought you were and who you thought you were becoming?

It’s not bad to be a part of a community or other group; it’s natural and essential. That doesn’t mean we have to accept a way of thinking that constantly interrupts our ability to change. You can also help to change your groups to be more aligned with this natural process. We don’t have to treat our groups as an immutable mold into which we force ourselves to fit; we can change the mold of the group itself by inserting ourselves as we are into the group.

If being a member of a group means that argumentation and questions are not allowed except by a few special leaders or people, that should be a red flag. If you have to behave in ways opposite of your values to prove that you belong, that's a red flag. If you are discouraged (or more often, distracted) from making changes, that is a red flag. Groups designed to interrupt our humanity are change breakers, so tread carefully within them.

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.