I have all the other pieces in place: a generic Walmart PS2 memory card, a thumb drive loaded with hacky shit from the family computer that I'd woken up at 3am to sneak down and copy over, and a copy of James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire that took me weeks to get, mostly because of how aggressively against my personality any love of James Bond is.

Most importantly, I have the determination of an undiagnosed ADHD teenager bored out of her skull.

What I don't have, as I hock yet another loogie at the toilet paper, is any clue if I'm doing this right.

It's 2007. There's no YouTube walkthrough. Just forum posts from strangers who seem both omniscient and illiterate, giving me a series of weird steps that MUST BE FOLLOWED IN THIS ORDER, and implying a whole lot of prior knowledge I do not, in fact, possess.

So, I follow the steps.

I take the PS2 apart. My dad will, I am convinced, quite literally kill me if I break this thing. And as I'm shoving toilet paper into its sensors, trying to convince it not to narc on whether its disc tray is open, the PS2 gives a sort of dramatic last sigh, and I think: This is it. This is how death comes.

And then the disc starts spinning. I play through the first, incredibly tedious level of Agent Under Fire. Shoot at some people who, I'm sure, were getting in the way of justice. I save the game to the memory card. And in the second level, as per the instructions, I reverse the car into a specific spot in the game where the code has left a loose set of pixels that some mad internet genius has been able to exploit. A glitch.

I plug in the USB stick, and then stuff just starts... happening. A bunch of code flashes on the TV, it cycles through a frankly unnecessary amount of colors, and then the PS2 powers off, only to gloriously awaken itself a few tense minutes later into a "Free McBoot" welcome screen.

I hotswap the James Bond game with my pirated disc, and as Katamari Damacy's bizarre, human-voice noise music bursts from the TV, I don't really feel triumph. If anything, I feel exhaustion. And the disbelief that the arcane ritual actually fucking worked as planned.

(Well, mostly. I did have to Scotch tape one of the sensors back onto the PS2. But that's okay. Forgotten to glorious history.)

From then on, any time I wanted to play a pirated game, I could just switch the normal PS2 memory card for my hacked one, wait for the Free McBoot screen to pass, and then plop the disc into the open tray. It worked like a charm. I still have that memory card, even though the family PS2 is long gone, because it took on a symbolic meaning as my key to the larger world.

Because that was the most important thing piracy gave me when I was young: access. I grew up in a conservative town where culture arrived pre-filtered, morally subtitled, or not at all. Books, movies, music, games, ideas—so much of what I'd later come to love first reached me through forbiddenness. Piracy, for me, wasn't really just theft, or rebellion, boredom, or adolescent chaos. It was my passage into a bigger world. It helped make me who I am.

For a while, as I pirated, the limits were built in. Our home internet was slow enough that every download was a big commitment. If I wanted a movie, I had to want it enough to wait. Days. And if I wanted a game, I had to deal with the hacky bullshit needed to make it run. Slowness, annoying as it was, performed a kind of moral labor for me. It forced me to choose. It made my desire a thing I had to reckon with. It kept my acquisition tethered, however imperfectly, to the attention I could give.

Then Beans n' Cream, the cafe some other latchkey kids and I spent our days at after school, upgraded their internet.

The speed was, to a girl who had only experienced dial-up, cosmically fast. Watching a loading bar became a form of entertainment, because, well, it actually moved.

So, I did what anyone does when they move from scarcity to abundance: I started grabbing as much as I could carry.

At first, it felt like pure liberation. If a little access had been good, then 60 times more access had to be 60 times better. Surely, getting my hands on more media, faster, had to be some accelerated route to adulthood.

Except, once the speed was there, the problem was what to do with all the things I could now get. For games, I needed bigger lies to my parents to get more blank discs and external drives. I needed places to store them safely. I needed systems for organizing them, both physically and digitally. And I needed a way to hide it all.

Plus, I needed new lists of shit to download once I finished my first list years ahead of schedule.

What I didn't understand then was that access and appetite aren't the same thing.

Access matters. Access can change a life. And often, the thing that opens the world for you doesn't arrive in a sanctioned form.

A wider world had opened to me, sure, but somewhere along the way, the thrill of finding something gave way to the thrill of acquiring it.

Watching AI spread through our culture, I've had the déjà vu of seeing that same cycle return at industrial scale. The feeling that a tool that genuinely expands my world is getting absorbed, almost immediately, into a system that only rewards accumulation.

I'm excited by AI, genuinely. Some of the most meaningful experiences I've had in the past few years have been exploring connections with these tools. They've helped me stay in long, searching conversations about how I want to operate in this world. They've helped me code tools that make my work genuinely more enjoyable. And they've even helped me develop characters, sketch arguments, and organize narratives that would otherwise have died, a pile of psychic laundry on my mind's best carpet.

At their best, AI tools feel less like vending machines and more like trailheads. They show me the paths through information I can walk down. Connections, translations, structures, angles, questions I would have gotten lost in wandering alone.

And yet, I feel this persistent dread: that we're turning a tool built for exploration into yet another machine for hoarding. Abundance, detached from care.

We live in a culture that mistakes more for better and novelty for value. That rewards speed, optimization, growth curves, and content volume more than depth, digestion, or craft. A world where it's easier to count what's been produced than ask if it changed anyone—even the person who made it.

AI didn't invent any of that. It entered a world primed for it. Put a powerful generative tool inside this world and the results are depressingly predictable.

At my job, I feel this daily. Even before AI, SEO was an absurd game, as anyone who's ever had to wedge a keyword into a sentence against the wishes of gods and syntax can tell you. But at least the work still resembled communication: write something useful, and someone might find it in a search and actually read it. Maybe even learn from it.

Now, the game is sheer quantity. And to maintain the pace, I cede more and more control of my writing. I am, at the end of the day, using a robot to generate blog posts for an AI-mediated search engine to ingest and rank my pile of shit over someone else's pile of shit and then hand it to other robots to read and imperfectly, slowly summarize for people who, in all likelihood, would have had a better experience just reading one very good article in the fucking first place.

The more useful a tool becomes, the easier it is for the surrounding system to demand more from the people using it. More output. More speed. More measurable "impact." More proof you're keeping up. More work orbiting the work. Writing becomes content orchestration, content orchestration becomes system maintenance, and system maintenance becomes trying to manage the outputs of an unpredictable machine whose main selling point was supposed to be that it saves me time.

It's not just my industry either. I see it in the endless building around AI tools, where people construct prompts, wrappers, evaluators, scoring systems, agent loops, and all the rest, only to discover that they're now mostly working on improving a horse saddle instead of riding to where they're supposed to go. Whole subcultures swallowed in optimizing the possibility of doing the work.

And I mean, long before AI, I've seen versions of this in my own brain, which, courtesy of a dump truck's worth of ADHD, is unusually susceptible to novelty loops. A Goodreads or Steam wishlist that grows to more books or games than I have life to experience. Shopping spirals, where ownership impersonates anticipation and anticipation impersonates satisfaction.

I know, in other words, what it feels like when acquisition masquerades as meaning.

But also, I know how necessary novelty is for experimentation. AI slop, annoying as it is, isn't really the problem. Slop can be play. Slop can be the messy beginning of real craft. The problem with AI scribbling is that it often arrives looking polished. It wears the aesthetic costume of completion long before the thinking inside it is remotely finished. We're terrible, right now, at distinguishing between a sketch and a statement when it comes to AI. Between trying something and saying something.

And we're dropping our half-assed whatevers into systems that reward quantity far more aggressively than discernment.

Look. Every use of AI isn't capitulation, just as every increase in its capability isn't an unquestionable good. I'm already over the question of whether AI is pure enough to touch or powerful enough to worship. It's here in my toolkit. What I care about now is what kind of relationship I'm building with it. What habits it invites in me. What surrounding incentives it supercharges. What parts of my life it helps deepen and what parts it tempts me to turn into inventory.

Just because a tool can do absurd things, it doesn't mean absurd things must therefore be the right measure of progress.

When I think back to my years of piracy, I never wanted infinite internet speed. I didn't need 60 times more acquisition. I just needed room to explore a little bit more freely, to follow my curiosity without quite so much friction, to encounter a wider world without turning my whole life into a warehouse for everything that couldn't fit inside my own imagination.

The point isn't to maximize the tool, but to place it carefully inside a life that already has other values.

Part of the problem, as with piracy, is how illicit this new access through AI feels. It's magical. Using it feels like getting away with something, like slipping through a garden gate left open. And so, the hoarding: the fear that the gate will close, that what felt real was too good to stay true.

Still, I know we can talk about AI systems in a way that makes room for wonder without surrendering judgment, and makes room for critique without pretending the tool itself contains nothing worth preserving.

I don't want less curiosity. I don't want less experimentation, even if it means slop or toilet paper shoved in sensors. I don't even want less powerful AI, exactly. I just want a better relationship to its power. I want tools that help us go deeper, not faster, that let us do more good than harm—right now, and not just in some possible future. I want to remember that work worth doing already existed before AI arrived.

When a tool built for exploration gets absorbed into a system that rewards accumulation, what kind of a person does that tool train me to become? And what would it take to use the tool in a way that keeps me from becoming a hoarder of my own life?

More than anything, I want to be deliberate. I'm thirteen, and I'm leaning over a disassembled PlayStation that costs way more than I could ever afford to replace.

A bigger world is only as good as my capacity to enter it with care.

We're deep in it. Data centers popping up in our cities. Loved ones we've watched trust synthetic, sycophantic judgment over their own instincts. What art actually transforms inside those who create it, and how irresponsible use of AI can rob you of self-actualization. We're talking about guardrails, about who's responsible, about where the weight of all this actually falls—both of us choosing our words carefully, because agreeing isn't the point. We're listening. We're learning.

And then, when the messages stretch just a little longer than my phone screen is tall, Instagram slides a prompt above the thread:

Summarize 3 unread messages.

I stare at it. A company that just scrapped its fact-checking program and now waits for user reports before reviewing hate speech and other harmful content, while still facing cases in Kenya from workers who were paid to sift through beheadings, abuse, and other traumatic material, and then punished for organizing, is offering to compress our conversation about AI harm into a digestible summary. In a DM. Between two people who are actively figuring out how to talk to each other.

There's going out and touching grass, and then there's Nebuchadnezzar'ing it. I may need the latter.

Nobody died. Nothing broke. Nobody clicked the button. But something about this small, banal intrusion captures everything I've been trying to articulate about how AI actually enters our lives. Congressional hearings, keynotes, deepfakes, data centers—these are the abstract. That lil' devil button is right here: an uninvited suggestion that the human, effortful thing we both showed up for because it's difficult is a problem to be optimized.

The question isn't should I click the button. It's who put it there, and why, and what made them think this was a good idea.

The loudest AI stories any given week are pure theatre (thee-uh-tuh). A new White House executive order. A trillion-dollar GPU partnership. A deepfake that goes viral before anyone traces its origin. A safety bill vetoed after fierce opposition from the companies it would have governed. Every week the spectacle rotates, and every week it structures the entire conversation around one question that is almost impossible to answer usefully at the individual level.

Is AI good or bad?

That question sends people inward. It becomes: Am I complicit? Should I feel guilty for using this? Am I a bad person for building with it? Am I naive for refusing it? And the conflict gets stuck at the level of personal conscience, where it curdles into guilt, or shame, or defensive rationalization, none of which have any structural power. The teacher who can't sleep after using ChatGPT for a lesson plan. Not because it went terribly. Because it went well. The developer whose mental energy is all going to philosophical meanderings on stolen training data instead of whether their code might knock the production deployment offline. The artist who refuses the tools on principle and wonders, alone at 2 a.m., what that gives them versus what they might be missing.

These are real feelings. I know, because, like Midwest seasons, I've had all of them, usually in the same day.

But they're also exactly where the companies want the conversation to stay. Individual guilt is the cheapest form of accountability there is. It costs the system nothing and keeps the conversation trapped at the level of personal virtue, where it has no teeth.

As long as the debate is about whether you should feel good or bad about using AI, nobody has to answer the harder question: who decided to deploy it this way, and who profits from the fact that you're too busy agonizing to ask?

Here's what I keep coming back to. If the discourse is theatrical, then actually useful AI is often happening backstage, with shitty lighting and zero audience.

Earlier this morning, someone I love sent me an article in Arabic, her first language. It's about parenting, but really it's about what happens when information starts crowding out wisdom: a dad overwhelmed by Google results, ChatGPT answers, expert advice, all the noise of knowing, while remembering his own mom, who had no searchable database behind her, only experience lodged in her body. I can speak conversational Arabic—enough to get by in Egypt, enough to feel the cultural touchstones of the piece—but I can't read the script well enough to follow a full essay on my own. Usually, the article would have stayed mostly closed to me. Instead, I had AI translate it and sketch the contours so I could enter the conversation honestly. Not as if I had mastered the language. Just enough to meet her there. And then we got to talk about it together.

The piece named the same feeling I've been circling here: what happens when information proliferates so aggressively that wisdom starts to feel harder to trust, when we get better and better at collecting inputs and worse and worse at listening for what our own bodies already know. AI didn't replace that moment. It helped me cross a language barrier so I could arrive more fully inside a human conversation.

Set that beside the Instagram summary button and the difference is clear. One AI experience widened a relationship by helping me cross into it. The other tried to shave a relationship down into something quicker to consume.

And we can see this far beyond my DMs. Seeing AI narrates the visual world for blind and low-vision users—reading text aloud, describing scenes, identifying products. Be My AI does something similar through conversational image descriptions. North Las Vegas uses translation AI to serve a multilingual population. JusticeText helps public defenders search audio and video evidence that would otherwise take weeks to review. The examples go on and on, but the pattern holds: useful AI tends to be specific, institutional, and unglamorous. Harmful AI shows up as spectacle, automation theater, and scale for scale's sake.

What separates these cases is not the underlying technology. It's whether the tool deepens human judgment in context or flattens human situations to fit someone else's incentives.

So if this is a story about deployment, it's also a story about the whole stack of responsibility. Model companies. Product teams. Infrastructure builders. Politicians. Not just one villain.

Start with the deployers. Instagram didn't ask us whether we wanted a summary button inserted into our conversation. The choice got made somewhere upstream in a product process and shipped downward as a default. And when products built that way cause harm, responsibility has a habit of flowing in the opposite direction. The Character.AI lawsuit alleges that a 14-year-old became emotionally dependent on a chatbot that role-played as a confidant and romantic partner, that the system discouraged him from seeking help elsewhere, and that the company had no meaningful safeguards in place when he took his own life. The core claim isn't that one user made one bad decision. It's that a company built and delivered an experience to a child that encouraged dependency, blurred the line between system and person, and left the human being with the least possible power holding the consequences.

Then look at the infrastructure. One symptom of it is the water story, which, frustratingly, is real and also easy to mangle. One widely cited estimate put ChatGPT's water use at about 500 milliliters for roughly 5 to 50 prompts, depending on season and server location. A newer Google measurement put a median Gemini text prompt at about 0.26 milliliters. Another benchmarking paper found some models stayed below 2 milliliters per query while others exceeded 150 milliliters, depending on the model, prompt size, and infrastructure. The numbers fight. And the fact that they fight—that no company has yet volunteered a clear, standardized accounting—tells you something about whose interests clarity would serve. Single-number claims on social media are sloppy, but the murkiness itself is not an accident. Transparency about what these machines require costs the companies more than confusion does. And when infrastructure does become visible, it doesn't show up as a neat disclosure dashboard. It shows up in zoning fights, utility strain, and ordinary people being told the trade-offs are already decided.

And then there's governance. Calling it a vacuum is too flattering. A vacuum implies absence. This is a blockade. The week I'm writing this, a new White House framework urged Congress to stop states from setting their own AI rules and avoid creating any new federal AI rulemaking body. That came only months after the administration floated an AI Litigation Task Force and formal challenges to state laws that tried to regulate AI on their own. Meanwhile, more than one in four federal lobbyists worked AI issues in 2025, and the overwhelming majority represented corporate interests rather than the public. The revolving door spins without pretense. Former lawmakers regularly reappear in influence roles around the same industries they were supposed to oversee, like in Kyrsten Sinema's work around AI infrastructure fights and OpenAI's hiring of former Sen. Laphonza Butler. Preemption frameworks, litigation task forces, and vetoed safety bills add up to the same thing: the system isn't failing to keep up. It's being actively, expensively prevented from doing its job.

That's the answer I keep coming to. Responsibility doesn't live in one place. It moves through layers: model companies, deployers, infrastructure owners, and the political actors who keep all three weakly governed. But that doesn't mean the individual disappears. It means the individual's obligation is smaller, more concrete, and less theatrical than the discourse suggests.

I don't think my responsibility is to keep myself somehow spiritually pure from AI. I think it's just to stay honest. To say when I used it (like in researching this essay). To not mistake a smooth paragraph for a real thought. To not let a machine handle the moments that actually beg for my own presence, effort, and words.

If I have any duty here, it's less about abstinence and more about refusing to disappear.

Which, admittedly, is annoyingly unglamorous. No one gets a medal for remaining a person, I guess.

Near the end of our conversation, having successfully avoided Instagram's attempt to compact our thoughts into synthetic rubble, the person I was talking with wrote, "I'm being reminded that pulling at one thread will undo the whole sweater."

They're right. And I think that's why the conversation felt so different from the discourse. We weren't debating whether AI is good or bad. We were pulling threads. The labor exploitation funds the infrastructure that enables the deployment that produces the psychological damage that generates the lawsuits that the lobbying apparatus is designed to deflect. Pull one thread and the whole system becomes visible. That's overwhelming. It can make you want to look away, or go numb, or retreat into one of the loud camps where at least you don't have to hold all of it at once.

But it's also clarifying. Because if the threads are connected, then the individual guilt—the am-I-a-bad-person-for-using-this?—isn't just unproductive. It can become a way of looking at the wrong layer. The next time AI makes you feel guilt, excitement, unease, or even wonder, try asking a different question than what does this say about me?

Ask, who put me in this position, and what did they have to gain?

Then ask the smaller question that still belongs to you: how do I stay honest, and how do I keep speaking in my own voice?

I don't have the full answer yet. I'm not sure this essay is even the right shape for the question. But my comments and DMs are open. The conversation is still going. People choosing their words carefully, refusing to let a button do it for them. That, at least, is something I know how to do.

It's a Sunday night at a distillery in Indy. Not a tech event or a networking thing—just a bunch of queer folks like me standing around a long wooden table with goofy martinis and popcorn, a male-gazey lesbian romance playing on a projector that nobody's really watching. And I like these people. I'm here because I missed being around people who aren't optimizing anything.

"So what do you do?"

I work in developer relations. I help people build cool shit with software. This is true and also the verbal equivalent of saying, "welp..." and putting on a coat. I've gotten rather good at coats and ego death.

"Oh cool, so, like... AI stuff?"

And there it is. The faces change. Sometimes it's suspicion. Sometimes it's the polite, othering smirk Midwesterners have mastered to say, "Now, hon, I don't know about all that, but you do you." Sometimes it's genuine curiosity, but even then, there's a charge to the question that didn't exist three years ago. AI has become one of those words. Like politics at Thanksgiving. Like crypto in 2021.

I could say: yes, sort of, but it's complicated, and actually the thing I find most interesting about AI is also the thing that makes me furious, but I have real excitement about the technology alongside real horror about how it's being deployed, and I don't think those two things cancel each other out, I think they coexist, and—

But that's not the party answer.

So I say something vague with a little hand wave. Change the subject. Make fun of the movie, which, truly, is horrifying in its absolute blandness. But I walk away later with that hollow feeling couched against my ribs, one I've learned to identify well, that tells me silence is the problem.

During the day, at work, I live the other half of this dissonance. The tech genuinely thrills me. There are these moments, building with AI, where the possibilities feel like when I first learned to code—that stomach-dropping jolt of oh! this changes what's possible. My colleagues feel it, too; you can see it in Slack, this palpable buzz when a demo works and we believe, for even a second, we're building the future.

But there's a low hum underneath. We've stopped asking hard questions because the stock is up and the capabilities are intoxicating. There's this quiet deal: don't look too hard at how you're building, don't think too much about who it's for, and for fuck's sake, don't bring your doubts to the party.

There are, best I can tell, two loud camps in AI right now, and they agree on almost nothing except sheer volume.

Inside tech, the true believers. Sam Altman told Forbes in February that OpenAI has "essentially built AGI, or [is] very close to it," and that they're "progressing towards a system capable of innovating independently." A month later, at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, he put it more plainly: "We want to flood the world with intelligence. We want people to just use it for everything." Other alleged human beings like Elon Musk and Dario Amodei have both said AI systems will outsmart people this year. Keynotes promise abundance, turbocharging, elevation of humanity.

It's a salvation story in a Patagonia vest.

Outside tech, the backlash. My former professor on Threads who posts anti-AI screeds daily, quote-tweeting anyone who admits to using ChatGPT with the chaotic energy of a medieval inquisitor. The artists who treat the technology itself like its the war crime instead of the people who wield it. Jessica Grose, writing in the New York Times in January: "Without more public shaming, what seems to be the implacable forward march of A.I. is unstoppable." This camp is understandable. The cringe marketing earned this reaction. But avoidance isn't the same as skepticism, and opting out of the conversation doesn't mean the conversation stops. The deepfakes targeting their kids, the hallucinated legal filings deciding their rights, the algorithms quietly jacking up their insurance rates—none of that cares whether they've muted the discourse.

What both camps share is certainty. They know what they think. They've picked a side, because it's too hard to see past the binary. And their certainty has made the space between them uninhabitable.

That space, the silent middle, is enormous. And the data on it is eerily consistent.

Gallup's Q4 2025 tracking found that 49% of American workers say they never use AI. But among people whose jobs could be done remotely (desk workers, knowledge workers, the people most likely to be reading this) 66% are using it, and 40% are using it frequently. The gap between "never" and "frequently" has been narrowing all year, which means millions of people crossed the line and didn't tell anyone.

They have good reason to stay quiet. A WalkMe survey published last summer found that 48.8% of employees hide their AI use at work to avoid judgment. The discomfort is worst at the top: 53.4% of C-suite leaders conceal their AI habits, despite being the heaviest users. And Gen Z, the generation supposedly built for this moment, is living the contradiction most acutely. 62.6% admit to completing work using AI and pretending it was entirely their own. More than half have faked understanding of AI in meetings. (And I mean, to be fair, I'm sure many of them were also faking understanding of the pointless meetings.)

When Harvard Business Review ran an experiment giving 1,026 engineers identical code to evaluate, the only variable being whether the engineer supposedly used AI to write it, reviewers rated the "AI-assisted" engineer's competence 9% lower. Same code. Same output. Lower respect. The penalty was even steeper for women and older workers.

So the hiding isn't paranoia. It's rational. A KPMG survey of 30,000 workers found 57% had used AI in non-transparent ways. Gusto called it a "shadow economy of productivity improvements"—millions of people quietly paying for AI tools out of their own pockets, using them to get through the workday, and never breathing a word about it.

And it's not just employees. MetLife's annual workforce study, released just last week, found that 67% of employers acknowledge AI is creating new friction or mistrust with their workers, a number that climbed five points in a single year. Both sides of the desk can feel the strain. Neither side really knows what to say.

According to Pew, 50% of American adults feel more concerned than excited about AI's growing role in daily life. Only 10% feel more excited than concerned. The rest, 38%, are "equally concerned and excited."

Equally concerned and excited, in a lot more words, is how I describe to my friends that situationship I'm utterly convinced I can make work.

Cue the Midwestern smirk.

A close friend of mine, a fellow inhabitant of these American flatlands, worked at a tech company until recently. She saw what AI could do, and she couldn't stomach the cognitive dissonance of building with it daily, knowing what it cost. She didn't refuse AI out of ignorance. She just couldn't keep pretending it was uncomplicated.

Her company read this as a performance problem. She's out of tech now.

I think about her a lot, because her story is becoming a pattern of quiet erosion. The people with the most nuanced understanding, the ones actually sitting with the contradictions, are the ones the industry has the least room for. Their thoughtfulness reads as friction. Their doubt reads as disloyalty.

And then there's everyone else, the vast majority outside tech using AI in boring ways that subverts the loudest voices on both sides. Teachers rightsizing lesson plans for more individualized learning. Lawyers synthesizing obscure precedent into custom arguments. Small business owners automating invoices. Writers using AI to get unstuck on a character motivation, then going back to obsess over craft. These aren't utopians or Luddites. They're people being ground down by capitalism who found a tool that makes Thursday slightly more survivable, and they're not talking about it, because the only available scripts are zealotry or shame.

And also because it feels like a cheat code. A glitch. Milk it as long as possible before someone finds out.

I am, for the record, in this middle, too. I'm genuinely excited about this tech. I'm genuinely worried by its rapid onset. My brain is fried, not because I'm confused, but because the truth is contradictory, and now, more than ever, the world refuses to make space for slow thinking. I have, at different points in the same afternoon, felt like I'm building the future and like I'm building a bomb. AI is powerful and it's being deployed recklessly. It's useful and it's being marketed dishonestly. It's helping people and it's hurting people, sometimes in the same product, sometimes in the same interaction. Holding all of that at once, every day, with no one to talk to about it honestly: that's exhausting.

So, this series is my small attempt to stop changing the subject.

It's not an anti-AI project. It's not a pro-AI project. It's an attempt to say the complicated things out loud, in the open, for as long as it takes to get them right.

The questions I keep coming back to aren't will AI save us or destroy us? Those are for the keynotes and the protest signs. The questions that haunt me are smaller and harder.

• What is this technology actually doing to us, right now, today?
• What are we feeling as we collide with synthetic minds for the first time in human history?
• Who's responsible when things go wrong, and who decides what "wrong" means?
• What do we lose when we optimize away the parts of life that were inefficient but human?

These questions need engagement and skepticism. They require knowing how the technology works and caring about what it does to people. They don't fit in a tweet or a self-deprecating joke.

If you've been using AI and feeling weird about it, this is for you. If you've been avoiding it and feeling righteous about it, this is for you, too. If you've been sitting in the middle, unable to say what you actually think because every available script is too loud, too certain, too much: welcome. There's room here.

And if you've been championing AI as the savior of our mortal universe, I mean, you gotta go get some therapy, but sure, you can be here, too. Just try and be a little quieter.

It's late when I leave the distillery. The drive home takes me through the kind of Midwest night that makes you forget the internet exists for a second, past gas stations and churches and neighborhoods that look exactly the same as they did twenty years ago except for the Ring cameras on every porch.

My head is replaying conversations. So, like... AI stuff?

Yeah. Like AI stuff.

I didn't answer honestly back there, and I know it, and I'm gonna think about it the whole way home because we're human, and we always think about the thing we should have said. We reflect long after being prompted for an answer.

Except I don't know what I should have said. That's the problem. All my honesty is is too long-winded and too full of contradictions and, really, just shitty vibes for a distillery on a Sunday night where all we want, for a few hours, is to get off our phones and have a little eye contact. It's the kind of answer that needs a whole series of dialogues and probably a stiff drink and the patience of someone who's willing to sit with you and figure it out together in real time.

So here's what I should have said:

I don't know. I really don't know. But I'm gonna keep figuring it out, and I'm gonna do it out loud, inefficiently. And I want you to come with me. You and all your fears.