About Life With Machines
Welcome to Life With Machines, a project from Baratunde Thurston dedicated to figuring out together how we–the humans–want to live in a world increasingly filled with AI.
This is a truly wild moment. Powerful technologies are being released into our lives faster than we can keep up, and we haven’t even been asked what we actually want from them.
We’re told the future is about efficiency, productivity, and autonomy, and that we need to get on board or be left behind.
Across an award-winning podcast, a YouTube series, and this very newsletter, Life With Machines exists to question that story and offer a better alternative.
We want to live well with technology, not just endure it. We think AI should enhance our humanity, not replace it. And we believe responsibility lies with the people who build these systems, not the tools themselves.
In short, AI isn’t doing anything that people don’t tell it to do. That means we have to hold the people building AI accountable for how they design it. And hold ourselves accountable for how we deploy it in our own lives.
The tech lords are trying to lure us into repeating the past and playing it forward. That isn’t progress. That’s regress. So the real question is this: how do we use this moment to re-create the story we’re living in, instead of doubling down on one we’ve already suffered through? How do we imagine and create a new story in which we learn from the past and do better this time?
Some of our favorite explorations of these questions live right here:
Why Subscribe
Subscribing to Life With Machines means choosing participation over passivity.
As a free subscriber, you’ll receive essays, reflections, interviews, and experiments that help you slow down, zoom out, and think more clearly about the role technology plays in your life and our collective future. This is a space for context, curiosity, and critical imagination, instead of hype or fear cycles.
Paid subscribers are supporting something deeper. You’re helping build independent, reader-supported media that answers to people, not platforms. You’re investing in work that treats AI as a site of empowerment and choice, not inevitability.
This community is for people who don’t want to be “kept in the loop.” We want to define the circle.
If that resonates, your subscription helps support this mission and grow the movement.
About Baratunde
I’m Baratunde Thurston. I tell it like it is, and the way it can be through stories of interdependence across our relationships with nature, humans, and technology.
I’ve been living with machines since the early 1980s as a child of my computer-programming mother. I’m a former tech columnist for Fast Company and Puck, repeat guest host on the Pivot podcast, advisor to Data & Society, and recipient of the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame Award. I led digital transformation at The Onion and The Daily Show and was an OG Black Twitter user (RIP, Twitter).
I’m also the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir How to Be Black, hosted and executive produced the PBS series America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, and co-created and hosted the award winning podcast How To Citizen with Baratunde–a show that redefined “citizen” as a verb.
I’ve spent my career working across media to help people understand systems, our place within them, and our power to create better ones.
Life With Machines is where I bring all of that curiosity to this AI moment. The future isn’t predetermined by code. It’s shaped by the choices we make together.
