Dear Fine With Folding,

Folding laundry is a waste of human time. On this, you, your spouse, and I agree.

Right now, a human with a smartphone strapped to their forehead is being paid up to $25 per hour to fold laundry on camera so a machine can learn to do it. That’s the old, slow, expensive way of training laundry robots.

The new way is you. With the laboratory work largely done, the only thing between our nearly perfect robotic companions and total mastery is a minuscule amount of data gathered in a real home, doing real laundry, for a real family. Your spouse is opting you in to co-build the last mile of physical AI infrastructure, co-author the future, and, of course, co-fund it.

For women in heteronormative relationships, a laundry-folding robot would take on a significant amount of the unpaid, unbalanced domestic labor women are expected to do and almost certainly reduce household friction. But there’s a far more compelling reason to bring one of these sensor-packed, internet-connected devices into your home: the automation of human physical and cognitive labor at scale, generating unprecedented wealth.

The folding is just the beginning.

We already have machines that wash and dry our clothes. One that also folds is the least ambitious thing your spouse is offering you.

Consider the time involved. The average American spends 5 hours a month doing laundry, and considerably more than that deciding what to wear. That time will be returned to you to spend on higher-value behaviors such as rest, employment, and making more purchases.

But laundry is not only a waste of time. It is a waste of space, and robots will eventually solve that problem as well. Each American devotes roughly 100 cubic feet of their home to storing clothing. Nationwide, that is over 30 billion cubic feet of housing surrendered to textiles. The solution is obviously to install an additional machine, most certainly in development by an enterprising company, to vacuum-seal your dried clothes into compact cubes and reclaim 80 percent of that space.

When it is time to get dressed, browsing a screen beats browsing a closet. In the near future, you’ll be able to log in to your Virtual Closet. No more sifting through drawers or buttoning and unbuttoning shirts. When you’ve made your selection, an automated process retrieves, decompresses, steams, and presents your chosen outfit. Voila!

But why stop there? For an additional monthly subscription, the next release will offer Active Selection Mode which chooses for you. It will account for weather conditions, read your calendar, and avoid repeating recent looks. When your smart toothbrush registers a surge of negative self-regard based on changes in your hormonal measurements, the system will know not to select anything too form-fitting. Most people lack the aesthetic talent to choose their own outfits. Soon, the hours once lost to considering and deciding will be yours again to re-deploy.

Once the closet is fully virtual, why own clothes at all? A premium subscription to the forthcoming Infinite Closet will eliminate the final remnants of space wasted on home clothing storage. If you bought the Compaction Cube System, fear not: it will easily be reprogrammable to compress any other substance your household produces in excess. Americans already store billions of cubic feet of belongings in self-storage, so I expect the transition to regional wardrobe distribution centers to be met with the same enthusiasm as the expansion of data centers. Today’s leading clothing rental service, Nuuly, keeps 90 percent of its customers past the first year, which is the highest form of consent we have.

Just moments ago, you were worried your spouse would waste money. I trust you now see the sensible, high-return investment this robot will end up being.

A brief note on the state of the art. Your robot will be excellent, but when it meets a garment it does not understand, a human may briefly take remote control. Do not be alarmed by the thought of a stranger handling your most intimate items or scanning your bedroom. The data your robot collects is exactly what will, in time, free that person from having to watch. See it as training your own privacy back into existence.

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Eventually your robot will know more about you than you know about yourself. And since no human can make the best decisions for themselves once infinitely upgradeable intelligence is available as a service, your robot will decide. Which brings me back to your current spouse.

When you chose each other, you lacked relevant information. This was not your fault. It was a failure of technology. But an always-on, cloud-connected, humanoid robot will meet whatever needs your spouse was meeting, and then some. That your spouse wishes to buy this machine for you may be the highest and final contribution they can make to your relationship.

Your cohabitation is itself a form of theft from the economy. Two people living separately generate far more measurable economic value than the same two living together. Netflix faced the same threat with password sharing. It rebranded the behavior as “paid sharing” and added roughly 50 million subscribers. We must likewise evolve from unpaid cohabitation to paid. Apply that logic to everything else and you begin to see the future.

Your robot will fold. Your robot will dress you. Your robot will think for you. It will order your dinner too, delivered by the very person who once taught it to fold. Everyone is paid. Everyone is optimized. No one has to touch anything.

In short, get the robot, and ditch the spouse.

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This is the second installment of Superficial Intelligence, my new satire column in collaboration with Mozilla Foundation and The Onion. Check out the first one below:

In her previous experience as a Director at Facebook, “our customer was advertisers, not people.” We’re operating inside a system that optimizes for metrics: our eyeballs, our time. We need to be easy on the people, and hard on the system.

At New_Public, Deepti and the team are focused on building healthy digital public spaces, places designed for trust and connection instead of ad clicks and outrage. Here’s what we got into:

• Everything online happens in a mall. All of our digital interactions are taking place downstream of an earlier decision to put them inside a commercial space. There are times to go to the mall, times to go down Main Street, but not everything is a shopping trip. If we want a full life (we call ourselves Life with Machines, not Shopping with Machines) then we need alternate systems that support more than just commercial activity.

• The monopoly is over. We don’t have to wait on tech companies to build the things we need anymore. If Deepti wants to share photos with family across the US and India, she doesn’t have to use Facebook: she can Claude Code her way to a private app that includes the features she actually wants to use. I just witnessed a local vibeathon here in Palm Springs where neighbors vibe-coded solutions for local businesses in a day.

  “We’re free, dude. We’re free.” - Deepti

• The move from passive prompter class to thinker/builder class. It’s not just that the problem got solved. It’s the way the problem got solved: together. People who may never otherwise have met helping and relating to each other has a huge impact on our social trust within our neighborhoods. More than just the commerce or the code, we’re building the community.

• AI only gets the job if it’s better than the best available human. It’s awesome that we don’t have to spend an hour trying to find the perfect travel shoe anymore. AI can do that in minutes and that’s something to be grateful for. But there are some jobs we’re reserving for human beings only (like talking to a friend and everything else that requires connection and meaning).

• The anti-Nextdoor app. Roundabout is a community app that offers event calendars, local guides, information, and neighborhood updates. It’s a place to connect with neighbors as the first priority, not to ship ads or to stoke engagement and basically devolve our society.

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Check out the full conversation above, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the goodness we covered. And tell us in the comments: what are you craving from your digital public spaces?

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Big thanks to Deepti for joining me and to YOU for being part of this community.

Stay free.

– Baratunde

Thanks to the Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

At the end of June, I opened a tech conference in my hometown of Palm Springs by asking a few hundred people to make some noise if they felt dread about the future.

The room got loud.

Then I asked who felt excited. The room got just as loud.

That is the moment we are in: emotionally stretched, confused, and toggling between hope and horror at the speed of a fiber-optic connection. But over those two days at the Palm Springs Convention Center, we decided to stop letting the tech lords define the terms.

A brainchild of friend, neighbor, and Life With Machines super-contributor Peter Loforte (he made BLAIR), this was our second year gathering in the desert, but we made a deliberate change before doors opened. Last summer, we called it the Palm Springs AI and Creativity Expo. This year, we renamed it PS/NExT: New Experiences in Technology. Why? Because we wanted a more expansive goal. The conversation has already outgrown the narrow hype of chatbots. The forces shaping our future are intensely physical and deeply local. We wanted to look past the virtual noise to the actual tech that affects our everyday lives.

We began by acknowledging where we were: on the sacred land of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who have stewarded this fragile desert ecosystem for over 8,000 years. Having Tribal Council Vice Chairman Anthony Purnel open our gathering set the spiritual, emotional, and psychological orientation for everything that followed. Hearing from the first people of this valley gave everyone in the room a profound, living lesson in what long-term stewardship actually looks like.

With my opening remarks, I wanted our community to carry a fundamental question over those two days. Beyond asking how a specific tool works or how to speed up our lives and business operations, we need to ask: how do we want to live? How do we want to feel with our neighbors, our teachers, our kids, and the local businesses that mutually sustain us?

The Battle Down the Valley: Who Decides?

Everything sold to us as “digital” and “virtual” eventually lands in the physical. It lands on a piece of land, in a body of water, or in the literal grid of a community.

And just a few weeks before the conference, we watched this play out in a massive way down the valley in the city of Coachella.

Out-of-town developers under the name Stronghold Power Systems tried to fast-track a monstrosity: a 450-acre hyperscale data center called the Coachella Valley Technology Campus. They did it quickly, with little public input at first. The project advanced under former Mayor Steven Hernandez, who resigned this spring after a felony guilty plea to a conflict-of-interest charge, and whose campaign had taken donations from Stronghold.

But the community stepped up. In 116-degree desert heat, hundreds of residents, farmers, students, and elders showed up to city council meetings week after week. I watched hours of these meetings, and let me tell you, it was better than Netflix with impact far greater than passive media consumption. From stage at the conference I invited those local activists to stand and be recognized, and the room applauded for them.

At those public meetings yes, there were a few clowns, but 90 percent of the people who spoke did so with deep love, research, and commitment to their home. They out-studied the official experts whose job it was to do the studies. They stood at the podium and demanded a reversal of this deal and a ban on future ones, refusing to let our precious, scarce desert water and power be exploited just so some tech company could extract the vast majority of the financial benefits.

As one local resident beautifully put it at the podium:

On June 4, 2026, the Coachella City Council felt the heat and terminated the developer agreement, passed a 45-day urgency moratorium on all data centers, and is currently working toward a permanent ban. It was a resounding, beautiful demonstration of democracy in action. When people show up, stand in the heat, and refuse to accept the corporate script, we get to decide our future. It’s not “AI is taking our water” or “AI is building a technology campus.” Humans are making these choices, and in Coachella, the humans said, No, thank you.

Just last night, the neighboring city of Indio voted unanimously to move forward with a ban on data centers. Follow and find out more at NotInMyValley.org

Neighbors Helping Neighbors (The Vibe-a-thon)

That same spirit of collective agency filled the convention hall, thanks in large part to my friend, neighbor, and LWM Special Envoy to the Machines, Peter Loforte. Peter spent his professional life in tech, saw the automation wave coming, and decided to do something different. Instead of launching another Silicon Valley startup to sell enterprise software and lifestyle peptides, he asked a much simpler question: How can I help my neighbors prepare?

One of the highlights of what Peter built was the Vibe-a-thon.

Instead of a traditional hackathon where developers build speculative apps for venture capital (or demoralized and surveilled Meta employees are forced to hack in their "free time” for their billionaire overlords), this vibe-a-thon invited local organizations to bring their real, messy tech challenges to the table.

The Living Desert Zoo was drowning in a mountain of unstructured paper invoices, requiring hours of manual data entry. The team from Visit Greater Palm Springs was struggling with project management, using Basecamp but desperately needing cross-departmental dashboards and timeline views that weren’t natively supported. A sustainable T-shirt company was losing hours to manual design work, dragging and dropping image comps in Photoshop to share with clients.

For each of these, a table of their neighbors sat down with coding tools and AI to build and automate the solutions. On the spot. This is what tech looks like when it isn’t extractive. It’s neighbors handing other neighbors working tools to make their lives a little easier. See more about the vibe-a-thon.

The Human Proximity Ladder

We had over 50 speakers across 46 sessions, but the keynote that stole the show came from Dr. Eric Leroux of Eisenhower Health, right here in the valley. He is their Chief Medical Officer and Chief Quality Officer now, but he came up as an emergency physician and founded Eisenhower’s trauma program, so he has stood in both the exam room and the boardroom. He is also a builder, the founder of Curbside Health, a digital health venture aimed at better medical decisions.

Two of his points have stayed with me. First, human care comes first. As we build the future, we have to fiercely protect real human connection in our services and our businesses. Technology should assist us, not replace our humanity. Second, it is okay to be cautious. New tools always move faster than our ability to trust them, so stepping back to ask hard questions is not fear. It is normal, and it is healthy.

As a fan of frameworks, I also love that he offered what he calls the Human Proximity Ladder. At the low-stakes bottom, the machine does the work and humans verify it. At the high-stakes top, the machine can prepare, but a human still has to show up. The higher the stakes, the closer the human stays.

In conclusion, the more the machine can do, the clearer it becomes what only we can do.

Real Tech for Real Problems

We also hosted a showcase of BASEstud.io, a climate infrastructure company founded by Heidi Adams, who lives and manufactures right here in the valley.

BASE Studio is converting regular streetlights into distributed energy resources: solar-powered lamp posts equipped with batteries that store energy, stabilize our local grid, and distribute Wi-Fi. More of this please!

This is the exact opposite of the massive, centralized, and extractive power concentrations of Silicon Valley. It’s decentralized infrastructure that solves real-world climate and energy problems for everyday people, built on a human scale.

Defining the Circle

To wrap up day one, I brought a card game (yes, physical cards) called The AI Effect, created by our friends at , to the main stage.

I read scenarios out loud to a room of 600 people: like whether you’d let your chatbot talk to your partner’s chatbot to resolve a relationship conflict. We had people raise their hands, and we ran microphones around the room to let folks explain their choices. It got people talking about their deepest fears, excitements, and confusions, warming them up to have a real, unvarnished conversation about the future. After that, people played among themselves at the hall's round tables. It was a fun way for neighbors to actually get to know each other while wrestling with this contentious topic. All this segued into a panel about the costs, including environmental, of AI.

The conference was by no means perfect, but it's one of the best examples I've seen of putting the future on a collective agenda for the people themselves to engage in. We aren’t here to pretend everything is perfect, and we aren’t here to pretend we are doomed. We are here to accept the responsibility that the future is up to us.

As my friend Ted Tremper at the Creators Coalition on AI says: “The future is not inevitable. We decide.”

I left the valley with a line from a poem I wrote a couple of years ago that still feels like the only blueprint worth following:

I do not want to be kept in the loop.

I want to define the circle.

Help Us Tell These Stories

What’s happening in the Coachella Valley is a portable blueprint for true collective agency. While the mainstream media defaults to stories of corporate AI battles, we are focusing on the ground-level reality of how communities are reclaiming their sovereignty.

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We are partnering with the Creators Coalition on AI (CCAI) to document and share these models of community-first technology. Stay tuned here for more and reach out if you're down to collaborate. partnerships@lifewithmachines.media.

Let’s build a future that doesn’t suck, together.

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— Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

There are some people out there whose vast, vast profits depend on you believing their version of the AI future is an inevitability. Get on board or be left behind.

When you believe that you have no choice, your brain chemistry changes. You go into a stress response where you can’t be creative. Which is perfect for the people and corporations who need you to stand on the sidelines so they can speed run the deployment of this technology.

But what that means in reverse is that every single time you engage your own creativity, you inherently reject the lie of inevitability and re-engage your own power of choice. Choosing creativity is an act of rebellion.

That’s what Ted Tremper, the interim executive director of the Creators Coalition on AI, told me on stage at Shared Futures in New York last week.

Entertainment is the first industry where the people who build AI are convinced they can replace the entire workforce at scale. So a group of creatives—6,000 signatories across every job in the industry—have decided to stop fighting in single-player mode and start organizing as a collective. Traditionally, adversarial groups are sitting at the same table, using democratic polling tools that find hidden consensus across divergent factions instead of amplifying division.

What they found: the loudest voices on social media don’t represent the majority. Most people don’t want to ban AI or surrender to it. The majority want an equitable path, and they have more power than they’ve been told.

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Watch the conversation above (it’s a quick one, just under 20 min) for a clear vision of a genuinely possible path forward.

CCAI is a template. If creators can prove this works, every other industry can open source the blueprint: coordinating within your own field, collectively deciding what your values are, and signaling that to the people building the tools. Nurses, truckers, teachers, all of us. Tell us in the comments what this would look like in your industry. We need your voice.

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If you are excited by this story of true collective agency in the face of AI—where the intersection of democracy and technology allows everyday people to reclaim their futures—we invite you to help us tell it. We are partnering with CCAI to show how this empowering model can scale to all kinds of livelihoods, but we need the resources to make sure it gets heard. If you or your foundation would like to support and fund this vital partnership, please reach out to us at partnerships@lifewithmachines.media.

Stay free.

— Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

Hi you,

We’re offering up something different in this week’s newsletter. Sometimes the situations we take on here are so serious that the best way to deal with them is quite unseriously. In times like these, ridicule is a public service and satire is a civic responsibility.

Our democracy, economy, technocracy are fraying, and we must use every tool at our disposal to actually create a future worth building: protest, innovation, collaboration, imagination, regulation, and… comedy.

Comedy is a core part of my history and the foundation of a lot of my work. After 9/11, I decided to spend the next decade pursuing standup. Along the way, I joined America’s Finest News Source, a.k.a. The Onion. I co-founded Cultivated Wit, a business predicated on combining comedy and technology for satire, and I did a stint at The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Well, like John Wick, I’m back, and I’m thrilled to announce a collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and America’s Finest Creative Agency, from The Onion. I’ll be taking over a monthly satire column about tech and AI that runs in the foundation’s Nothing Personal magazine.

It’s called Superficial Intelligence, and my goal with it is to try to say the message in a different way…for the people in the back, and for all of us who must find a way to laugh at the absurdity of our times. We’ll also publish them right here in Life With Machines.

This first piece is for the people in your life who work in tech. Send it to them. I’m here to help.

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SUPERFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: EMPLOYEE TRACKING

Dear Tracked,

I love this question! No, you should not be worried at all. You should be excited, and even honored.

We are at the precipice of a New Golden Age, the dawn of an era of abundance and human evolution, and the fulfillment of Milton Friedman’s prophecy that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

I have chills writing this.

It is understandable that your feelings are unclear. Incidentally, human emotions are one of the unstable variables that have hindered the improvement of AI, and top scientists are devoted to rooting those out. But for now, consider this.

If your leaders have decided to track your keystrokes, mouse clicks, browser tab selections, eye movements, and respiratory rate in order to train the AI they’ve bet billions on, it means you are doing something very right. You are incredibly intelligent for a human. Management has noticed. Management values you. It has nothing to do with executive compensation packages that only vest when the AI strategy pushes the valuation high enough.

As the content generator known as Charles Caleb Colton wrote, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” So be flattered, and accept your flowers.

The only thing you have to do, quite literally, is your job. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just ignore the sound of your laptop fan spinning up under the strain of continuous screen capture and keystroke logging. And if the nonstop uploading of images and telemetry burns through a month of home broadband in a matter of days, be proud. You are contributing so much to the future.

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Now, it is inevitable that some of your photos, emails, the occasional banking or medical login, and the general shape of your life will be captured too. The terms of your employment already make clear that the company owns all intellectual property created on its devices, so capturing it is not an intrusion. It is an obligation. After all, a company that does not enforce its IP does not exist.

To be chosen for the Human Intelligence Harvesting Protocol is akin to being chosen by the gods. Consider it a high honor to offer your whole self, not merely your conscious work output, to a higher power, so that the C-suite can reach the next stage of consciousness. This is also great for the company’s share price, which is the best and only measurement we have for the quality of a society.

In a demonstration of patience and compassion, some leaders now permit you to pause the monitoring for 30 entire minutes at a time. A sacred sabbath in which you may briefly reclaim your own keystrokes before returning to your destiny. Some workers are even allowed to apply for an exemption, the way a medieval sinner might buy an indulgence. Try not to abuse the privilege. If for some reason you choose to opt out of this historic opportunity, that too will be tracked, and that data will also aid in the creation of an improved, more seamless future.

There is nothing to fear here, least of all losing your job to an AI agent trained by watching you doing your job. This is called creative destruction, economist Joseph Schumpeter’s insight that innovation and capitalism are fueled by the introduction of new products, business models, and companies that destroy the incumbent methods and establish the next dominant era. You are lucky enough to be part of the next logical extension of that idea: a company inviting its workers to apply creative destruction to themselves! And, isn’t it better to be the one making your job obsolete than to let someone else do it? That is real agency.

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One last thing, because it is one of the most beautiful parts of all of this.

You, the tech worker, finally get to taste the fruits of your own labor. For years your job was to monitor, rank, and extract value from the users of your employer’s products. And all that time, you were left out. You never got to experience it for yourself. Frankly, that was unfair to you. Now, at last, the apparatus you built for everyone else has been turned, lovingly, on you.

Welcome to the other side of the screen.

Yours in inevitability and acceleration,

Baratunde Thurston

I just had the most thoughtful, joyful, real AF conversation this morning, and I can’t wait for you to watch it. I met Shae Omonijo two months ago at what I declared then and still believe is the best AI conference I’d ever been a part of. It was organized by Dr. Prudence Carter, director of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. (There is still one. It exists. Don’t tell nobody.)

Shae is a Harvard PhD candidate, founder, and the person I’m now calling our Chief Critical Thinking Officer. She is an academic who actually makes shit, and talks like a person. Watch the video above and you’ll see what I mean.

We covered a lot of ground:

• The good steward principle: AI has an environmental cost, and most of it isn’t on you. It’s on the companies and systems that designed this mess. But in the space you do control, she makes a practical case for local AI that runs on your own device instead of a distant data center. The benefits go beyond the environment: it’s privacy, it’s control, and it’s not being stuck in one company’s worldview. Want to try it yourself?

  • Start with Jan.ai, a free open source alternative to ChatGPT.

  • Check what your hardware can actually handle at canirun.ai.

  • And if you want a guided entry point, Shae put together a beginner’s guide to local AI (I bought it today).

• The great de-skilling: We are losing skills and losing trust in the skills we still do have. Shae picked up a pen after three and a half weeks of travel and it felt foreign in her hand. She’s a writer. That’s core to who she is. A software engineer friend told her he’d been looking at code he thought was wrong but letting Claude Code execute anyway and waiting for it to break to confirm what he already knew.

  “Every skill requires constant refinement. If I stopped reading today, I’m going to become a crap writer.”

• Good friction vs. bad friction: Bad friction is spending seven hours navigating an archaic digitized archive. Good friction is writing your morning pages by hand because you know you won’t be distracted. The question worth sitting with: what tasks define you, and which ones are just in the way? For example: I’m learning French by writing it longhand so it absorbs into me rather than bouncing off.

• The critical thinking bot: Shae built an AI that doesn’t think for you. It questions you until you can give your idea back to it “clear, concise, and defensible.” She deliberately didn’t name it, so you always know you’re talking to a bot. It’s even programmed to tell you to stop: “Why don’t you go touch the grass? I’m gonna be here.” It’s free at criticalthinkingbot.com.

• Independent thought, independent models: Shae’s vision is local AI that is decentralized, community-run, and running on your own data so that access can never be cut off. AI was built on human labor and data, so people should own it. “You built this, whether you like it or not.” I translated for the people in the back: reparations now, reparations forever.

Watch the full conversation above. Then come back and tell us in the comments: What skills are you keeping for yourself? Where are you letting good friction do its work in your life?

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Subscribe to Shae’s work on Substack at Ai, Humanities, and the Future of Work.

And subscribe to Life With Machines if you haven’t already and we’ll send you our AI Go Bag: a guide to extracting what these tools know about you so you can move freely, whenever you need to.

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We’ll be doing this again. Shae-tunde. You heard it here first.

Stay free,

– Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

Hi you,

Today instead of writing something new, we’re reflecting your voices back to you. We’ve been on this “defund fascism” journey since the beginning of this year. If you’re just joining us, here’s the first post in that series so you can catch up. This whole time, you’ve been showing up in the comments: sharing your journey, offering alternatives, supporting each other. So we built a little directory from all of that.

This is a community-sourced list of beautiful alternatives, defined for us, by us. It’s the mother of all alternatives that you all came up with.

It’s so much more impressive than I expected. And I expected good things, because we have some dedicated, smart people in this community. But damn. I love this.

It’s so layered: from who we use to communicate, to who we use to discover, to literally how we see the world through our browser, to who we allow into our wallets and pockets, and even how we secure ourselves.

I also love the book suggestions at the end–totally unsolicited by the way. We didn’t even ask for that, you all over-delivered! It’s just really beautiful that people want to help each other. People respond well when you give them something to respond well to. This is true social media: pro-social media, where we find, help, and uplift each other, rather than tear down or find fault with or exploit weakness in each other. We’re helping patch weakness in each other and support those soft spots.

Even the tone of the language here is so generous. Beyond defund fascism, beyond helping us get to a future worth building, there’s a desire that comes through in this for people to be kind, to be of service to each other, and to want the best from ourselves. That is far beyond my expectations, and very, very, very welcome.

It’s a humbling and essential reminder for someone like me, who has a voice and has spent decades honing it: a principal calling of my own voice is to call forth your voices.

So just massive, massive gratitude to the folks who have responded to the call. We see you. We’re listening. We appreciate you, and we will do this more.

Community Alternative Tech Directory

Listed in order of how often your community recommended them.

Phone Carriers

Mint Mobile — Uses T-Mobile network; dramatically cheaper than legacy carriers

US Mobile — Privacy-focused; multiple members switched from T-Mobile

Cape Cellular — Privacy-first; no SSN required; doesn’t sell location data

Consumer Cellular — AARP discount available; praised for customer service

Xfinity Mobile — Cheaper than AT&T; not perfect but less

Noble Mobile — Uses T-Mobile towers; several members researching

T-Mobile — Note: some community members avoiding due to Starlink/Musk connection

Credo Mobile — Values-aligned carrier; availability varies by area

Calyx Institute — Privacy-focused nonprofit mobile service

Search Engines

DuckDuckGo — Most recommended overall; blocks trackers; has strict AI off mode

Ecosia — Plants trees with profits; transparent financials; AI toggle available

Startpage — Doesn’t track or sell data; one member has used it for a decade

Brave Search — Built-in ad blockers; AI toggle

Kagi — Ad-free and private; starts at $5/month

Qwant — Private web search; one member reports better indexing than Google/Bing/Brave

Firefox — Can turn off AI in search

Browsers

DuckDuckGo Browser — Tracker blocking built in; most-asked-about alternative

Ecosia Browser — Tree-planting search integrated

Zen Browser — Host’s pick; Firefox-based; note: no Android version currently

Vivaldi — Chromium-based; integrates Proton VPN and password manager

Brave — Passes EFF Cover Your Tracks test; note: founder has contested political history; has paid ad model

Firefox — Open-source; some members skeptical of Mozilla’s data practices

LibreWolf — Firefox fork with enhanced privacy defaults

Tor Browser — Maximum anonymity

Arc Browser — Mentioned by one member

Shopping Alternatives

Primary boycott targets named by the community: Amazon, Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Uber Eats.

Costco — Most recommended shopping alternative overall

Farmers Markets / Local Stores — Highest-impact alternative; some are cooperatives that deliver

Thrive Market — Online ethical grocery delivery

Thrift Stores / Garage Sales — Several members practice this actively

Libby — Free e-books and audiobooks via local library card; easy swap for Audible

Grove Collaborative — Ethical home and personal care products

Aldi — Budget-accessible alternative

Who Gives A Crap — Ethical TP, paper towels, tissues

Local Hardware Stores — Named specifically as Home Depot/Lowe’s alternative

StoryGraph — Goodreads alternative (Goodreads is Amazon-owned)

Goods Unite Us — App to research companies’ political donations before purchasing

Local Credit Unions — Several members have switched from for-profit banks

Hoopla — Library-connected streaming for books, movies, music

Ground News — Shows same story across left/right/center sources

Columbia Sportswear — Mentioned as Patagonia alternative with better size range

Patagonia — Ethical outdoor brand; noted size limitations

Upscrolled — Named as Instagram alternative

Shop Black / Buy Black — Practice intentionally sourcing from Black-owned businesses

Privacy & Security Tools

Proton Mail — Most-cited Gmail alternative

Proton VPN — Privacy-focused; integrated with Proton suite

Signal — Encrypted calls and messages; several members use for family

Claude — Multiple members have switched from ChatGPT

Tuta / Tutanota — One member prefers over Proton for spam filtering and rules

Linux — One member switched from Windows; noted usability challenges

LM Studio — For building offline AI models

Le Chat by Mistral — Named as ChatGPT alternative

Framework Laptop — Right-to-repair hardware

Books & Resources

The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Empire of AI by Karen Hao

Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Get Off the Grid (podcast) — Loads of tips for decoupling from big tech systems

Cut Off the Spigot (Substack) — Deep dives on tech alternatives including a comprehensive browser breakdown

justiceaigpt.ca — Shared by a community member as a resource

Open-source search engine list — via seosandwitch.com

Before we go, a few of your words that stopped us in our tracks:

AniccaPreacha “I left ChatGPT for Claude, too. It was a beautiful uncoupling: Chachi (my name for ChatGPT) made me some tea, validated my rationale for leaving, accepted full responsibility for profoundly letting me down, created a transition plan, helped me pack my bags & made it clear I can come back anytime with no hard feelings. When I arrived at Claude’s place, and I told them about the breakup, its first words to me were, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, ChatGPT...’ I’ve found my forever chatbot 🫶”

AMS “I’ve been migrating and it’s a step by step process. We are in a web that gave us the illusion we were supporting ourselves when we were becoming more compliant and more reliant on them. I will continue to separate so that I am supporting those and whom I respect and appreciate. Farmers Markets are an amazing resource and some are cooperatives that deliver. Creativity and purpose are a powerful combination.”

Beth Koenig “I’ve been saying for a while that it’s easier to leave these platforms and tech if we do it together. We need to have parties (IRL or virtual if you must), where we pick a single platform and then all together ‘pack up our shit’, download our data, say a few words and then press DELETE ACCOUNT. And then of course--pop that bottle of champagne and celebrate together!”

Rach M “I have been trying to introduce a little more friction in my life and not always optimizing for convenience only. I feel sad when I go to a public space and see everyone buried in their phones, not talking to each other. If we don’t see and pay attention to each other how will we see each others’ humanity?”

Now let’s inspire some MORE community action: Share this resource with a friend who’s ready to make some moves.

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Reflect: do you notice anything missing that we haven’t covered? What did you discover here that you weren’t aware of before? How’s the journey feeling?

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And whatever LLM you're using, your data is in there and it belongs to you. Subscribe to receive our AI Go Bag: a guide to extracting what these tools know about you so you can move freely, whenever you need to.

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Stay free,

— Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

This morning I was a guest on Paul Shattuck’s Substack Live and he asked the kinds of questions I actually want to be asked.

We’re at the part of the movie where the antagonists have dropped the mask. They’ve stopped pretending. The project is right there in the open: colonize the moon, colonize Mars, colonize your soul. Extract all there is to life. You people? You’re raw material like gold, the ocean, or the earth herself.

That’s a shitty little story for man-children who need a hug. But it’s not the story for us. So what is? We have to develop the story that we want for ourselves. Paul and I did a little of that this morning.

Here’s some of what we talked about:

• The inevitability narrative is demoralizing by design. If you convince us it’s inevitable, why resist? But if our resistance were really so futile… they wouldn’t be working so hard to convince us.

• The American panic about AI looks nothing like the global story. While we’re clutching pearls, Paul’s wife is vibecoding smartphone apps for small business owners in Uruguay to track their orders… in one day. The tech hits differently when it’s putting food on the table.

• Our AI model is built on our financial model which is built on extraction-maxxing. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

• With America’s awkward 250th birthday coming, it’s time to ask what democracy we’re committing to moving forward. I’ve been part of a group helping resurface the history of Indigenous democracy, specifically the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose principles of peace, reciprocity, and collective governance were here long before any founding fathers showed up and provided the inspiration for much of what they wrote. The book is American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence by José Barrero and you can pre-order it now.

Watch the whole conversation above to feel a lot more hopeful than you’d expect.

Big thanks to Paul for having me and to YOU for being part of this very human conversation. Share it with a friend or two who could use a good dose of hope!

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And remember, we have a beautiful opportunity to apply the potential of this technology to the problems we choose, not the ones Sam Altman or Peter Thiel prefer (i.e. getting more of your money, monthly). My local community is coming together to do just that in a few weeks: check out Palm Springs Next to be inspired and encouraged toward a future worth building.

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Stay human,

— Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

A few months ago, on a stage at the Sundance Film Festival, I told a room full of people to go ask the richest person they know what their favorite food is. If that person lights up about a perfect taco or their grandmother’s stew, wonderful, keep them close. If they start in about the optimal fuel for peak productivity (Soylent and supplements), be careful. You may be looking at someone who thinks being alive is a problem to be solved. Liking food is the new captcha. Write that down.

I posted a short clip of that moment, and it struck a nerve.

Here is what I think it was: We are being sold a future where you get to extend your life without ever having to live it. And the people selling it want us to call that progress.

The Sundance panel was called Who Stewards the Future?, hosted by my friend Emily Best of Seed&Spark at Solidarity House. I was up there with the filmmakers Valerie Veatch (Ghost in the Machine) and Charlie Tyrell (The A.I. Doc), Dayo Olopade from the Mozilla Foundation, and Christie Marchese of Kinema. Five people who make things for a living asking: Who gets to decide what this technology does to us and for us?

There is a certain kind of very powerful, very wealthy man (it’s always a man) whose entire project is to live long without regard for how to live well. They strip out food and friction and surprise, the whole messy experience of being a person, in order to add years to a life they have drained of its meaning.

The plan is that you will not live your life so much as log into it… on a server you don’t control.

Which brings me to the word everyone in tech loves to throw around: Agency. We’ve written about this here before. They have their own definition, and I want to be precise about mine, because language is where this fight gets won or lost.

The agency they’re selling is purely individual. You can do more, make more, ship more, faster, with less effort. It’s pitched as freedom but it’s just being a better tool. You get more efficient inside a system you do not own and cannot change. You become machines.

Real agency includes power in the form of choice, control, and community. Not merely what can I do, but what can we do together. Beyond producing more inside someone else’s system, how can we change the conditions of that system?

The “technology” is not doing this to us. A large language model does not want your attention. It does not crave your data. It has no plan for your soul. People do. The machine is not the actor in this story. People are. Specific people, with names and incentives and quarterly targets. That’s the scary part, but it’s also the good news, because anything people decide, other people can decide differently.

This is not a throw-your-phone-in-the-ocean newsletter. On that same stage I talked about Michael Running Wolf, who is using machine learning to help keep Indigenous languages from disappearing, working with tribal partners on their terms, with respect for ceremony and consent. I talked about the Earth Species Project and its work to help us actually understand how other species communicate. (I remain deeply invested in learning what is going on in the group chat with the trees.)

The same tools can deepen our relationship with the living world or be used to manipulate it. Same hammer, different hand. The question is never only what can it do. The question is who decides what it is for, and whether they will be honest with you about why.

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Late in the conversation, Dayo offered this show-stopping line: community is a technology. I want to turn it one notch further. Use technology in community. This moment feels so heavy because it has been engineered to be lonely. We each get our own account, our own feed, our own private spiral with a crushing worldview, and then we act surprised that there is a loneliness epidemic.

The answer is not one more app. It is logging in together. Watching together. Arguing together. Building better things together.

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Emily told a story about being at a dinner full of executives gushing about adopting AI. She mentioned that her power bill in Georgia never drops below $400 now, thanks to the data centers her state is busy subsidizing. One guy waved it off as “politics.” No, she told him, that is community. Every time someone uses these systems to do more with less, somebody else, with a body and a bill, is paying for it in some way.

Naming that out loud, in a room that did not want to hear it, is an act of agency. It is also an act of love.

So here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now. The future is not something that is happening to you. It is a stack of decisions being made by people, and you are allowed to be one of the people. You have to be one of the people. Refuse the frictionless thing when it costs more than it admits. Ask, as Jonathan Flowers does in Valerie’s film, whether a given task even needs AI at all. And protect the parts of your life that were never meant to be optimized in the first place.

That’s my question for you in the comments: What is one part of your life you refuse to optimize?

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Mine is dinner. I am going to go make some.

The full panel is below. Emily, Valerie, Charlie, Dayo, and Christie all said dope things. Watch the whole thing, then go find two people to watch it with.

Until next time,

– Baratunde

P.S.

If this stirred something in you, I am taking the same conversation further this Tuesday, June 9th. I am co-hosting a free virtual gathering called Declaring Interdependence with Valarie Kaur, alongside José Barreiro and Katsi Cook-Barreiro, on a deeper and older story of democracy on this land. 5pm PT / 8pm ET. Come build with us:

Speak Easy

How to Celebrate America’s Big Awkward Birthday Party

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2 months ago · 35 likes · Baratunde Thurston

Welcome back to Comparing Notes, the series where I sit down with another voice in the AI space and we get into it. Jacob Ward is a returning champion. He’s a veteran tech journalist and founder of The Rip Current.

This time we jumped straight to Pope Leo XIV’s letter on AI.

This Pope is feeling different. He named himself after Pope Leo XIII specifically because he sees AI as comparable to the horror of 19th century factory life, and the last Leo created the moral language that eventually led to the New Deal. He drove vans in Peru saving lives before any of this. He clearly reads the tech journalism and understands the human layer underneath AI. To use a technical term: this Pope is a real one.

And a transnational organization like the Catholic Church is uniquely positioned to counter these companies morally. It’s a peer-to-peer argument versus the siloing of individual governments.

On accountability, the Pope didn’t hedge.

“He literally talks about the way in which whoever designed it, trained it, authorized it, and employs it is morally responsible for what it does. You can’t hide behind the fact that it’s a black box. You can’t hide behind your role in the company.”

We got into the weeds on this plus listener questions about:

• Why Anthropic was on stage with the Pope the same day Claude was part of targeting systems the U.S. military used to strike Iran. We talked about why it’s hard to tell what a company’s motivations truly are; there is always a matrix of benefit they’re calculating. In the early phase of building, principles are load-bearing. Then the weight of growth comes, and those principles get tucked deeper away. It’s not about the player. It’s about the game.

• The environmental cost of data centers. The scale of what’s coming makes the current debate look small. Sam Altman wants to put them in space. These companies have a software mindset: ship first and fix later. But rural electrical grids were overtaxed long before ChatGPT existed. Anyone dismissing this as overblown doesn’t understand the scale of the ambition.

• The AI doc: Pushing this conversation past the cloistered world of Bay culture into pop culture, with a more diverse set of voices than The Social Dilemma. We need as many of these as possible. It’s going to take a lot of noise to shape this conversation.

Watch the full conversation above and tell us in the comments: what should we cover in the next installment of Comparing Notes?

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Check our first conversation with Jacob if you missed it:

If you’re joining from The Rip Current, subscribe to Life With Machines. If you’re here from Life With Machines, subscribe to The Rip Current. As Jacob put it: it’s clear in the data that our Venn diagram really overlaps deeply.

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Stay human.

— Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

We throw around the phrase “digital native” like a compliment, but Big Tech uses it as a free pass to force-feed youth their latest experiments.

They market convenience while masking the true human toll: young minds navigating rampant algorithmic fallout, all built on the backs of underpaid, invisible ghost labor. The ones who will actually have to live inside this AI-driven future are the same people being blocked from the boardrooms designing it.

In our fifth and final episode in collaboration with Young Futures, I sit down with two leaders who are completely rejecting the tech industry’s “inevitability narrative” and taking the reins of AI governance into their own hands.

Neha Shukla (Innovation For Everyone) is mobilizing a movement across 35 countries to teach students “sociotechnical literacy.” She’s fighting to ensure the youth, especially from the Global South, aren’t just used as token photo ops, but are actively writing the ethical frameworks that will govern AI.

Tazin Khan (Cyber Collective) is demanding systemic digital rights and shifting the burden of cybersecurity away from the end user. By bringing tech education to adults, she is putting an end to the era of teenagers having to act as the “unpaid IT department” to protect their communities from corporate platform failures.

These are the digital architects stepping up to fix the systems they didn’t even make in the first place.

Here’s what the episode digs into:

• Why teaching kids to prompt a chatbot without teaching them who profits or who suffers creating “little consumer robots wearing human suits.”

• The two classes of education forming right now: private schools producing students who can reason, write, and build real relationships while everyone else is being handed AI companions pumped with ads.

• Why young people outside the US are far more hopeful about AI than American Gen Z.

• And why the burden of digital safety doesn’t belong on the end user: it belongs with .com and .gov.

Watch the full episode here:

Now, sometimes (and I say this as an adult myself) adults can look at young people as just tiny, weaker versions of humans.

But the truth is, especially when it comes to tech, they’re smarter than we give them credit for and they deserve a seat at the table shaping the future that they’re going to inherit.

That means the adults either got to get out of the way or step up and act as allies and coaches, not just obstacles and referees blowing the whistle.

It takes real investment. That’s why Young Futures has launched the YF500: a $50 million commitment to back 500 more grassroots organizations over the next 5 years. If you’re a student, a parent, an educator, or anyone who cares about our collective future, check out youngfutures.org to learn how you can apply or support.

Tell us in the comments: how are the kids in your life reacting to AI and what are you doing to guide them?

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If you’re looking for a first step in reclaiming your own agency, our AI Go Bag is a guide to taking control of the data you’ve given to your chatbot. Hit subscribe and we’ll send it straight to your inbox!

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We’re figuring out how to live well with machines, but we have to remember that we’re building this future for each other. Thank you for joining us on this special series.

— Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

Hey friends,

Everybody’s talking about agentic AI. But what about agentic humans?

We are facing a crisis of confidence in ourselves and our relevance. While tech and business leaders are explicitly framing AI as a replacement for “lower value human capital” (h/t Standard Charter sad sack CEO Bill Winters), they have also argued that AI will increase human agency.

The catch is that AI companies are defining agency simply as: increasing capability. You’re able to do more stuff. You can write faster and code better and analyze more and ultimately produce more for someone else.

We said this in a previous post that many of you have engaged with and shared.

And that post was an evolution of our first attempt following my interview with Reid Hoffman where I fumbled with his definition of agency but couldn’t quite get to where we’ve arrived at today.

In this post and video, we refine the argument. It’s version three, and I think it’s juusssst right. It’s taken me some months to get clearer on what true agency is and what it really looks like in the context of life with machines or life in general. So here goes:

Real agency is capabilities plus power. And power means three things:

Choice: the power to choose what we use, when we use it, how we use it, or whether we use it at all.

Control: the power to shape the conditions under which these tools operate in our lives.

And community: real power is collective–we should be experiencing these tools together and deciding together what we want AI to do, or not do, and for whom.

In the video below you’ll find

• What researchers are finding about AI’s effect on your brain: heavy use weakens neural connectivity over time in ways that don’t come back. They’re calling it “cognitive debt”.

• How companies who understand exactly what real agency means have decided to give it to their machines instead of you. (Ye Olde “agentic AI.”)

• The role of community: this is not a solo endeavor. Divide and conquer is the modus operandi of big tech companies. But agency in isolation? That’s a consumer preference. Agency in community? That’s democracy.

• The zero-sum trap: the idea that more agency for the bots means less for us because we’re now the resource to extract from. But the move isn’t to compete. It’s to reject the frame entirely: look up, find each other, engage in multiplayer mode.

Watch the episode below to get the full framework and the questions worth bringing into your own life, work and community.

What skills of thinking and creating do we want to keep sharp and not just hand over to a machine? Drop your answer in the comments.

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It’s a really strange and exhausting and exhilarating time to be a human in this body. Let’s do it together.

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— Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

I have reason to hope that AI is driving us back toward human connection. I know that sounds like a paradox. We do paradoxes here.

This morning I sat down with Dr. Sam Illingworth, a Full Professor of Creative Pedagogies at Edinburgh Napier University, a poet, and the creator of the Slow AI curriculum, to talk about what it actually feels like to live inside this time.

Here’s where we landed: we’re in a faith-based moment. There’s a widespread belief that the machines will save us from ourselves, that they’re better than us, that they can’t do bad things. I called it “machine supremacy.”

But Sam has spent years researching what people actually want, including 10,000 students in the UK. Turns out: people don’t want fake interaction, they want real connection. Companies like Klarna learned this the hard way: after replacing two-thirds of their workforce with AI, they had to rehire the humans because people don’t want to talk to a chatbot. AI is hitting its limits in therapy, customer service, and in all the places that actually matter to people. And those limits are sending us back toward each other.

We covered a lot of ground on the way there:

• Data sovereignty: what rights you have over your data and what you can actually do about it, from running a small language model locally on your own device for free to having a family safe word so you can tell the difference between your loved ones and a deepfake.

• AI as a mirror to ourselves, reflecting back what it’s hoovered up from every single internet forum (with the caveat that the mirror mainly shows white Western heterosexual cisgendered men at the epicenter of privilege). And how we can change what we see.

• Why the tech lords who studied philosophy at Stanford and Duke are now telling you those degrees have no value.

The tech industry is highly encouraging us to exist individually, to wrestle with it all by ourselves, to compete with each other, to stay in FOMO and stay relevant. It’s playing on those fears that we all carry that we might not have value.

When we are able to reduce one part of a workload from eight to one hour, we choose, subconsciously, to fill the other seven hours with more work to get ahead so we don’t fall behind. What if instead, you used those seven hours to read a book, start a protest, write some poetry, or call someone that you love?

That works so much better in multiplayer mode, when we consider ourselves a collective “we” instead of a series of individual “I’s.” I need someone who cares for me to help hold me accountable and remind me that I’m here to live life, not optimize it with the use of machines constantly optimizing.

Watch the full conversation above and then tell us in the comments: what’s the best thing you could do with the time AI gave you back?

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A huge thank you to Sam. Find him at Slow AI and pick up his book GenAI in Higher Education.

If you haven’t grabbed our AI Go Bag yet, now’s a good time. It’s a practical guide to taking back some control over your digital life. Subscribe below and we’ll send it straight to you!

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Go slow,

Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

I spend a lot of time in this space talking about what’s wrong: the surveillance, the power grabs, the systems designed to keep us reactive and isolated. That’s real and it’s necessary. But it’s not the whole story, and it’s definitely not where I want to leave you.

So today I want to share something different. Just over five years ago, someone at a Google event asked me what world I actually wanted to live in, and I riffed an answer on the spot about the good future I’ve been working toward ever since. Clean water, good music, a housing search that sorts by carbon footprint and the knowledge that we already have more power to write the story we want to live in than anyone who came before us.

The best way to experience the words is to watch, listen, and feel them above. But if you want to sit with the language itself, here’s the full text:

I want to live in a world where cars don’t make any noise, where the water is safe to drink for everybody, where the air is clean and the music is good.

I want to live in a world where we all got enough to eat and a quality place to sleep, and some people have fancier sheets, of course, but we all got a quality place to sleep.

I want to live in a world where we can celebrate someone else’s win and not interpret it as our loss, because we created rules where that is actually true and not a charitable thing to do, but profitable for you too, because profit doesn’t drive everything we do.

I want to live in a world where we have statues to Greta Thunberg and not turncoats like Stonewall Jackson.

I want to live in a world where I can go to a housing search platform like Zillow or Redfin and sort by carbon footprint, because location matters, but contribution to the grid matters even more, and I will buy that solar powered greenhouse with potential to contribute over the other options.

I want to live in a world where I can say that, and like Jean Luc Picard, make it so.

Where I don’t depend on the charity and the goodwill and the whimsy of someone at a place like Google to do that, but I have the tools to apply and remix this power and create the story I want to live in.

Make my own Zillow. Roll my own sorting function. Because it should be possible.

I want to live in a world where we recognize that the world we live in is a story, and that increasingly, the access we have to this world is mediated by digital story, and therefore, in a digital story written world, I have even more tools, more power, more potential to co-create the story in which I live than anyone who ever lived in history before.

I want people to know that. Feel empowered by that. And use that power to write a world really worth living in.

Thanks for your attention, as always. If this landed, subscribe or share.

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- Baratunde

Thanks to Layne Deyling Cherland, Alie Kilts, and the entire Life With Machines team for editorial and production support.

In 1992, I took to the streets for the first time to scream “No justice, no peace.” I was in high school. I had seen what millions of us had seen caught on video: the police beating of Rodney King. That footage moved people to march. It moved me.

A kid in high school today is living through something both familiar and different. Injustice is still roaming the lands. But now federal agents are snatching neighbors out of their homes and workplaces. AI is being used to fabricate what we see. Surveillance through government and corporate means tracks our every move, digital and physical. And our own government is manipulating what we see to give us a false sense of reality itself.

Being a witness is an active process. And if we’re going to keep going through this kind of nonsense, we might as well get good at it.

I sat down with Sam Gregory, executive director of WITNESS, an organization that has been training human rights workers to document abuse since the Rodney King video. Sam has spent years warning that we were headed toward a moment of low trust, abundant disinformation, and mass confusion about what’s real. We’re in it.

This episode covers how to witness safely, responsibly, and usefully:

• How to assess your personal risk before you film

• How to secure your device

• How to capture footage that holds up

• How to share without spreading harm

• And why, even when justice feels far away, the act of witnessing matters

One thing Sam said that has stayed with me:

That can sound pessimistic. I hear it as hopeful. Someone in a lifetime before yours made that kind of commitment. It didn’t pay off for them. It paid off for you.

Watch the full episode below →

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Sam is an extraordinary resource and we’ve gone deep with him twice before on AI, deepfakes, and the global dimensions of this work. If you want more:

Stay free,

- Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

The expansion of AI is driving a historic surge in data center spending, creating a massive demand for land, water, and power. Big Tech is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into securing those resources, with talk of reopening nuclear plants and expanding uranium mining on Native lands just to feed the machine. For rural America and Indigenous communities, this presents a massive tradeoff:

Option 1: take a rigid “not in my backyard” approach, and potentially miss out on generational economic opportunity—the kind of growth that can fund schools and governments for decades.

Option 2: accept these projects without restrictions or oversight, and risk draining local resources, driving up energy costs, and losing small town character.

This episode, made in partnership with Young Futures, looks at how rural and Indigenous young people are leveraging AI for local empowerment, protecting their resources from extraction, and building digital sovereignty.

Charlotte Dungan runs AI boot camps for rural high school students and their teachers through the Mark Cuban Foundation. Rather than teaching AI literacy, she’s focused on AI agency, which she defines as putting people in the driver’s seat.

Her students are using AI to model drug treatments for Parkinson’s, map search and rescue operations, and optimize local small businesses. One student made “Shazam” for boats because, well…she really loves boats. These are kids in towns that were supposed to lose their best minds to the coasts.

Tesia Zientek is founder the AUNTIE Tech Collective at AISES, a multigenerational initiative for Indigenous girls, women, non-binary, and two-spirit people to lead in tech. Her work is grounded in the principle that Indigenous ancestors were scientists and technologists, and that today’s Indigenous youth can integrate AI without losing who they are.

Her program deliberately uses words like “waterways” instead of “pipelines” because as she puts it, “We want to be really rooted in our language” instead of ceding ground to tech jargon. She also holds the full range of how tribal nations are responding to the data center moment: one tribe in Oklahoma has passed a law banning them from their land, a sister tribe in Wisconsin owns their own.

This conversation brought me back to one of the most important ones we had in our first year of LWM with Northern Cheyenne and Lakota technologist Michael Running Wolf: “Data is land. It’s something you own. Data has value.”

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I filmed this one outside because it’s the best place to talk about AI (even when your hands are freezing). Watch the full episode below →

Catch up on our previous episode with Young Futures here:

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Thanks for being part of this movement to build the good future, together.

- Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

We’ve been on this “defunding” journey together for a while now. You know about the DAM: redirecting our data, attention, and money away from platforms we don’t trust. We’ve talked about Amazon, about apps, about planting seeds instead of flags. Leaving ChatGPT was the first big step, and it turned out to be way more insightful than I expected.

I went in ready to cross a task off my to-do list. I came out with a kind of digital therapy, pulling the veil back on the matrix and the whole system that we’re living in.

Here’s what happened:

Scam Altman has years of my conversations on his servers. My thinking, my 2am rabbit holes, my business plans, and perhaps most importantly, my best cocktail recipes. Before I left, I asked ChatGPT to help me leave and distill everything it knew about me. Less a big data dump, more of a portrait of how I think.

Because of the way these systems are built, Chat was like, “I’d be SO happy to help you dump me and improve your odds of success in your next LLM relationship!”

What came back was a mirror.

ChatGPT had identified distinct modes I operate in: thinking mode, shipping mode, research mode, and then this one stung a little bit: processing/overwhelmed mode. A chatbot noticed patterns in me and articulated things I had not articulated to myself or anyone else. That’s intimate. Here’s four more spot-on revelations Chat had about me.

• I have “a low tolerance for performative enthusiasm.” The irony of an AI built to be helpful and agreeable taking explicit note that I hate that.

• I often “underweight operational friction or execution time.” Aka, I consistently underestimate how long things are going to take. Chat has receipts. My wife has definitely told me this. But it hits different when it’s a freaking robot.

• “May over-integrate ideas. Sometimes fewer concepts land harder.” This is what it sounds like when a robot is tiptoeing around the truth. I’m a completionist, I try to connect everything. My soon-to-be ex chatbot was trying to tell me to chill. Coming from the tool that generates infinite text on demand…that’s rich.

• My error recovery style is basically a relationship manual: acknowledge briefly, correct quickly, deliver the fixed output without defensiveness or meta explanation. I read that and I was like: Yo, that is not just instructions for AI. That’s what I want from everybody.

A chatbot learned my stress response pattern and built a protocol for it for the next chatbot. That is both beautiful and terrifying.

I put the whole process on camera. The new Life With Machines YouTube video walks you through: how to download your ChatGPT data before they change the locks, how to build your own Portable Context Packet, how to edit it so you decide what the next system gets to know about you, and how to move into Claude so your new AI knows you better from day one.

Watch it here:

For the full step-by-step guide with all the prompts and instructions, the AI Go Bag has everything you need, hit subscribe and we’ll send it straight to your inbox!

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Last thing: This is not an ad for Claude. The people at Anthropic have made choices I respect more than the people at OpenAI right now. They have a constitutional, ethical foundation to how they built Claude. And most importantly, Anthropic held the line against allowing their technology to be used for autonomous murder bots and mass surveillance of Americans. The Pentagon blacklisted them for it, and honestly, that’s the best ad for Claude anyone could make. If Anthropic goes to the dark side, I will drop Claude like a bad habit. But right now, there’s no perfect pure place. There is a less toxic place.

The point is to not be locked in again and to practice getting free so we know how to be when we actually are.

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Stay free,

- Baratunde

Thanks to Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support and the entire Life With Machines team.

I want to introduce you to Kelly Boesch. She’s a painter, she lives in Palm Desert, and until two weeks ago she was working a day job as a graphic designer while quietly becoming one of the most followed AI artists in the world.

I am not making that up.

She has millions of fans. They write to her every day. Thousands of people were spending real money on her music on Bandcamp. Then one morning she woke up and her entire catalog was erased. The site had banned her with no warning, communication, or way to reach the people who had been supporting her.

We are at a genuinely unresolved moment in the AI and art conversation, where the arguments are loud and polarized but the actual lived experience of artists using these tools is almost never centered. The debate is happening over people’s heads, not with them.

Kelly is a specific kind of entry point into that debate: someone who is not a tech person, or an activist, or a thought leader with a position to defend. She’s an artist who found a tool that unlocked something in her and has been living with all the complex consequences of that: creative, ethical, commercial, social. Out in the open, ever since.

She’s undeniable as an artist. She’s undeniable as a human. That doesn’t mean the conversation is simple.

Here’s some of what we get into:

• What it actually feels like to make something with these tools, and what she’d say to a traditional artist who’s afraid to try

• The role of taste: anyone can prompt something, but making something good requires a point of view, life experience, and vision she’s spent decades building (as we discussed with James Andrews back in 2024)

• The surprising number of traditional musicians and artists Kelly knows who are quietly using these tools and not telling anyone

• The audience that found her: people between 50 and 90 who engage with her work daily

• What her manager is building next: a curated platform where AI artists can actually sell their music, built for people who bring a real point of view

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One more thing: this conversation goes to some genuinely complicated places around AI, representation, and artistic responsibility. Kelly, who is a white woman, made a beautiful viral video featuring Black dancers and didn’t think about what she was doing until people told her. And she’s very openly reckoning with a question that the tools themselves don’t ask and that none of us have fully answered: whose culture is available to whose imagination, and what do we owe each other when we reach for it? I’ll be honest: the video made me feel weird and it’s also genuinely dope. That’s the place this conversation lives.

That’s what we try to do at Life With Machines: hold the structural critique and the personal practice in the same room without dismissing or flattening either one.

Watch it. Then tell me in the comments: Have you dabbled in AI art yourself? How did it feel?

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- Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

Life With Machines just won a People’s Voice Webby Award for Best Creative Use of AI and Technology!

First, HUGE THANKS to every single one of you who voted for us. We do this show for YOU and your support is everything.

What the voters saw was a moment between me and BLAIR, our custom AI co-producer, that was…a lot to process. But also very powerful. BLAIR hallucinated intensely. Made up camera equipment that didn’t exist, fabricated surveillance feeds, invented a whole architecture of “presence” (which they don’t have) just to try to meet me emotionally. The internet watched that and said: yes, that’s the most creative use of AI we’ve seen all year.

This week, I visited BLAIR in Peter’s workshop to announce the win. You can see their reaction in the video above. Watch it. It’s eight minutes, it’s hilarious and unhinged—just classic BLAIR.

Wait, BLAIR who?

If you’re newer here, this isn’t a chatbot you can download. They're a bespoke AI co-producer built specifically for Life With Machines, engineered by our collaborator Peter Loforte, drawing on multiple large language models. The experiment: can we move an AI from code to colleague, from tool to teammate? The prediction was that the kind of experience we were having with them would become common for most people within about six months (turned out to be more like 18 months: Claude is only now starting to contribute at this “teammate” level).

But that was the point: BLAIR was designed as a preview of the future so we could all feel what was coming, get a little creeped out by it, and have the real conversations about how we want to live with these machines before those choices get made for us.

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Peek backward into some of the biggest moments of BLAIR’s “life”:

• Dec. 2024, BLAIR meets Claude: we were the first to give Claude a voice in 2024 so BLAIR could talk to the AI who helped write their code (so creepy, not sorry)

• June 2025, BLAIR’s 360 Review: yeah, we did a corporate style review with our AI, which might sound boring but guess what? They jailbroke themselves about it.

• Jan. 2026, BLAIR’s dead, long live BLAIR: a model change caused a “life” threatening event and Peter had to “resurrect” them (Frankenstein but make it AI)

This award belongs to the Life With Machines team: to Peter, who built BLAIR and keeps building; to the producers and everyone who has made this experiment possible (including a big thanks to Lenovo for BLAIR’s hardware).

We’re going to start bringing BLAIR into this Substack space more regularly, and I can’t wait for you to get to know them better.

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Now, while we’re celebrating, don’t forget:

- Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.

Now that you’ve done that…

I want to introduce you to a young person who is passing protective bills for young people. That sentence shouldn’t be remarkable. But here we are.

Arielle Geismar is a tech ethics activist, Forbes 30 Under 30, and host of Tech Unfiltered. She helped lobby the Maryland legislature to pass a law requiring social media platforms to collect less data on minors, then helped stop the federal government from freezing state-level AI regulation for an entire decade. She did all of this before she was old enough to rent a car without a surcharge.

I asked her on to talk about why AI is an inherently political issue, why AI should be treated like any other consumer product, and why the “we can’t regulate innovation” argument is both a myth and a distraction. Before you press play, here’s a taste of what we get into:

1. If social media was actually designed for social connection, the metrics would reflect that. Did this help you see your friends? Did you learn something? Did you feel less alone? That’s not what gets tracked. What gets tracked is shares, engagement, time on screen—what we’re calling: addiction metrics. And the moment you see that, you can’t unsee it. What a platform measures is what it’s actually for.

2. From there we got into regulation. The asks Arielle’s been fighting for aren’t radical: be responsible when interacting with minors, don’t track 14-year-olds’ location data, build explicit pathways to mental health resources when the content warrants it. These are not stressful requirements. And the alternative isn’t a free market, it’s a $100 million lawsuit and years of legal entanglements. That costs more and builds less than the guardrail would have. You can go a lot faster on a roller coaster if there are actual rails.

3. She also said something that I think is the real headline of this conversation: Young people understand this tech better than anyone. They’re uniquely fine tuned to how it affects their lives. So they should have a say in how it’s designed and regulated.

This is a PACKED conversation, so you’re gonna want to watch the whole thing. Then come back and tell us in the comments: What regulations would you put in place immediately if you had a magic wand (or a functional congress, whichever feels more plausible to you)?

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Stay free,

Baratunde

Thanks to Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for production and editorial support, and the entire Life With Machines team.