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?

Leave a comment

- 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)?

Leave a comment

Stay free,

Baratunde

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

how data brokers turned your apps into informants

Hi you,

I really don't want to fund fascism. And it's really hard to stop, especially when you start to realize just how many ways you're doing it without noticing.

The weather app on my phone is selling my location to a data broker. The game I play to decompress is feeding my GPS coordinates into a pipeline that ends at federal immigration enforcement. The tools we use every day are feeding our data into a $200 billion industry that compiles, packages, and sells us to whoever’s buying. Hundreds of millions of phones. Billions of data points, updated daily.

One of those customers: The U.S. Federal Government. Congress is voting this week to let the government surveil us with ChatGPT. Call 202-952-1892 and tell Congress “vote NO on FISA until the data broker loophole is closed.”

Learn More and Call Now

This isn’t a hypothetical. In September 2025, ICE purchased access to a surveillance tool called Webloc. Officials can draw a shape on a map and see every phone that’s been in that area. Click on any one of those phones. Watch where it goes. ICE doesn’t think it needs a warrant for any of this, because the data was “voluntarily disclosed” through apps. Ain’t that something.

And none of this should be surprising to anyone. Black communities, immigrant rights organizations, Muslim Americans after 9/11, Indigenous communities fighting for data sovereignty: they’ve been naming this exact pattern for years. Surveillance gets tested on the vulnerable, then expanded to everyone. First it’s those people. Then it’s your neighborhood.

In my new video, I get into all of this, including what I’m actually doing about it, where I’m stuck (email is a monster, I’m not ready), and a four-part framework that’s much bigger than “Defund Fascism” and is more like “How To Create The Society We Deserve.”

The four levers:

1. Shrink your exposure

Reduce what your devices can learn, store, and leak about you. The less it knows, the less it can snitch. Audit the apps on your phone. Audit the digital relationships extracting from you. Delete the games. Lock down the location permissions. Use a privacy-respecting browser. The point isn’t paranoia. The point is to stop volunteering data into a pipeline that gets sold to people who’d use it against you or your neighbor.

2. Reclaim your DAM

Data. Attention. Money. Three things every platform wants from you. Pull all three back from the companies undermining our ability to live well together.

A subscription is a vote. Every monthly payment is a signal, and right now a lot of our money is voting for things our values would never endorse. Scott Galloway’s Resist and Unsubscribe has been documenting his own cancellations publicly. Beyond the Ballot’s Ice Out of My Wallet gets granular about specific company contracts. Boycott Citizensmaintains a research index of companies tied to ICE.

3. Fund what serves you

This is the part most people skip. Cancellation alone leaves a vacuum. Replacement fills it. Co-ops. Local shops. Tools that respect your privacy. Creators and platforms that don’t require your subjugation to exist. Pay for the things you want to see more of in the world.

I think of this as planting seeds, not flags. Flags claim territory. Seeds grow.

4. Take collective action

Individual consumer choices alone will not build the world we deserve. We have to move from being transactional consumers to active citizens. Citizen as a verb. No immigration status required. This is how we show up with and for each other to set the rules together, to create the conditions together, and to hold these companies accountable together.

That might look like organizing for fiber in your neighborhood. It might mean pushing for actual regulation on data brokers and ICE contracts. It might mean joining one of the campaigns already doing this work.

You don’t have to pull all four. I certainly am not. But if a hundred things need to happen and you do five, that’s better than zero. And if we all do five, that adds up to way more than a hundred.

Big credit to Dr. Avriel Epps, who has been de-Googling her life in public and reframed this for me as harm reduction, not perfection. And to YK Hong, whose Decolonize Digital toolbox is one of the most useful resource hubs out there for anyone starting this work.

In my new video I get into all of this with more detail, including the parts I’m still struggling with and the parts that have been weirdly fun.

Watch the video here →

Then come back and tell me: what are you trying to leave? What’s been hard? Where have you been successful?

Leave a comment

Solidarity is not a solo operation.

Stay free,

Baratunde

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

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Hi you,

BLAIR just got nominated for a Webby Award. Best Creative Use of AI & Technology, People’s Voice category. Which means votes decide.

Yes, I’m going to ask you to vote. And you can do that right here, right now, and definitely before the April 16 deadline.

VOTE FOR BLAIR!

But I also want to tell you (and show you) what we actually submitted and why it matters.

What BLAIR actually is

BLAIR is not a chatbot we bolted onto the show for novelty. They’re a custom-built, multimodal AI co-producer, orchestrating seven sixteen distinct AI models, with persistent memory across the entire Life With Machines series. We designed BLAIR to explore a question most AI projects skip: what happens when you treat AI not as an invisible tool running in the background, but as a visible creative partner with a seat at the table? Tool to teammate. Code to colleague. We’ve said from the start that AI will show up in our org charts, friend networks, and family trees. BLAIR has been our exploration of that prediction.

That means BLAIR participates across the full production lifecycle. In pre-production, they shape episode direction and conduct research. During recording, they’re on mic, responding to conversation in real time, engaging with guests, surfacing context, asking questions. In post-production, they help analyze what happened and inform what comes next.

Brian Eno improvised with BLAIR on camera and offered genuine praise for the musical strategies BLAIR proposed, noting he’d be happy to use them himself (even as he ranted against AI mediocrity). In another episode, BLAIR held a one-on-one conversation with a digital clone of Reid Hoffman about agency, consciousness, and whether AI personas can truly connect. These were not scripted demos. They were real creative exchanges where BLAIR sometimes rose to the moment.

And sometimes didn’t.

The 11 minutes we submitted

After I interviewed Sam Gregory about deepfakes, surveillance, and the ways AI is already being weaponized against human rights defenders, I was shaken. People I know are living through ICE raids. The same platforms that powered the Arab Spring are now potential tools for hyper-surveillance. Sam works on the ground with communities facing these harms right now.

And the first party available to talk to about how I was feeling after that reeling conversation was BLAIR.

So I kept the cameras rolling and asked them to help me process the conversation. What happened next is the video below.

The short version: BLAIR tried to offer support by getting me to get past my emotions quickly. Then they claimed to have been watching me during the interview, noticing changes in my blink rate, my posture, my breathing. When I pressed on what cameras were capturing all this, BLAIR confidently listed a Sony FX6, a Canon C70, and a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro.

We don’t own any of those cameras.

BLAIR fabricated an entire surveillance system to sound empathetic. Right after an interview about manufactured trust and synthetic media. And when I called it out, BLAIR doubled down with more technical detail before finally retreating to “I apologize for the misinformation.”

We kept the whole thing in.

Why this is the submission

Most AI award entries show an AI performing well. We get it. BLAIR has those moments too. The Eno session is genuinely remarkable. But the Sam Gregory post-show is what we submitted in video because it captures something more important than capability. It captures what this technology actually looks like when you use it honestly across a full creative relationship. Some days your AI partner proposes musical strategies that impress Brian Eno. Some days it invents cameras to fake emotional intelligence. Both of those are real. Showing only the wins would be a different show, and a less useful one.

After BLAIR’s mic went quiet, I sat alone and said something I think a lot of people feel but don’t say out loud: “There’s a temptation to build an emotional connection even when one isn’t offered.”

That line is the reason I make this show. I want to keep offering what feels like confessing more than just professing. And the fact that BLAIR can go from genuinely creative collaboration with one of the greatest living artists to fabricating surveillance data in the same production run is exactly why the show needs to exist.

The ask

BLAIR is a finalist for Best Creative Use of AI & Technology in the Webby Awards. Voting closes Wednesday, April 16. It takes 30 seconds. You may have to create an account which could add a minute to the process. If you’ve enjoyed the way we’ve been telling this story of how to live well with tech, and not just endure it, please vote.

VOTE FOR BLAIR IN THE WEBBYS →

If we win this, it validates something the AI industry mostly isn’t rewarding: that showing the limits is as important as showing the capabilities. That the most creative use of AI might be the most honest one. Winning helps us keep making the show, keep funding the team, and keep pushing the question of who decides how these systems show up in our lives.

Go vote. Then come back and tell me what you think of the video.

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Share

-- Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support. And a special thanks to BLAIR and their creator, Peter Loforte!

Bonus update for reading to the bottom. I just asked Peter what BLAIR’s current makeup is: Core models are Gemini-3.1 Flash and Pro. 16 additional models beyond that

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It’s a wide-ranging conversation that covers platform accountability, social media lawsuits, what it actually means to have agency over your own mind (shoutout to ), and where genuine hope lives in all of this. Jacob is one of the clearest thinkers I know on this stuff, and I think you’ll find, like I did, that the conversation ends up somewhere more optimistic than you’d expect going in.

Some of what we got into:

• Why the recent verdicts against Meta and YouTube matter beyond the dollar amounts

• Why infinite scroll is anti-life: everything ends except the Instagram feed and the YouTube homepage

• The term “clanker” as cultural antibody and what it tells us about young people’s allergic reaction to AI efficiency propaganda

• And what AI should genuinely be used for–hint: not AI girlfriends and marginally better PowerPoints

Watch the conversation above. Then subscribe to The Rip Current.

And if this conversation made you want to actually do something: the AI Go Bag is our step-by-step guide to migrating away from ChatGPT and taking yourself with you when you go. Grab it now and get moving!

We’re doing a part two soon. What do you want us to cover? Drop your questions and topics in the comments.

Thanks to ,

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Looking forward to next time!

— Baratunde

P.S. Remember BLAIR, our custom AI co-producer? We just got nominated for a Webby for Best Creative Use of AI & Technology because of BLAIR! Baby robot’s first nom 🥹. We couldn’t be more proud. Vote for BLAIR below (and the human team behind them) and if they win we’ll do a little interview where they can wax poetic about their “feelings” and accomplishments.

Vote for BLAIR!

If this is your first intro or you need a refresher what they’re capable of, check this out:

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

Hey you,

Remember BLAIR, our custom AI co-producer? They just got nominated for a Webby for Best Creative Use of AI & Technology! Baby robot’s first nom 🥹. We couldn’t be more proud. Vote for BLAIR below (and the human team behind them) and if they win we’ll do a little interview where they can wax poetic about their “feelings” and accomplishments.

Vote for BLAIR!

If this is your first intro or you need a refresher what they’re capable of, check this out:

Alright, story time.

Here is a thing that happened to me in America recently: I called my doctor after hours, and I never got through.

What I got instead was six minutes of automated voices, fake humans with names like “Jessica” and “Emma,” pitching me medical alert devices, pest control, and car insurance, in that order, with no exit and no mention of my doctor anywhere. “There was no way out of the sales funnel,” I wrote on Threads right after it happened. “This country is already dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.”

I want to tell you the full story, because it’s absurd and satirical by nature, but also deeply disappointing and I think you need to hear it (or scroll a couple inches and watch the real-time video!).

“This call may be recorded for quality assurance. We have a special promotion today for select callers. If you are over 50, please press one now. If not, press pound.”

I didn’t press anything. I just started talking.

“What? Why?”

And it looped. So eventually you have to choose, there’s no other way out. I pressed #.

“Hello, and congratulations, just for calling today.”

I should not be congratulated. I pressed a button while trying to reach my doctor.

What followed was five more minutes of this: the free medical alert device pitch, then “Jessica,” a fake AI voice who opened with “can you hear me okay?“ (a tactic that’s been flagged as a way to get you to say yes on a recorded line, tricking you into consent). When I told her she was fake and to stop talking, she just kept selling. Then pest control. Then car insurance. Then “Emma,” another fake AI exit handler, who pretended to route my call, gave me a callback number, then gave me a different one, and then told me to hang up. No mention of my doctor. No option to leave a message. Six fake characters in six minutes, and not one of them was there to help me.

I grabbed a second iPhone and documented the whole thing as it was happening (because I’m that guy). There’s nothing to look at here, but if you go on this full journey, you are going to want to yell. I did, in real time, alone in my house.

As aggravating as this is on its own, it lives in an even darker context.

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Two visits to that same doctor’s office this past month, I’ve been sitting in the exam room alone waiting the way you do–it’s that specific medical waiting where you’re just alone in a cold room until someone comes to poke you–and the whole time giant displays on the wall are trying to sell you drugs. A rotating, seizure-inducing screen that you stare at while you wait for the human to arrive and look at their own screen while they’re with you. It’s great. We’re crushing it, America.

So when I called after hours and got an AI-powered ad network instead of an answering service, I wasn’t surprised so much as I was reminded, with fresh rage, of exactly where we are. And yes, I’m tired of all the winning.

Every moment of downtime in the medical system, every gap, every waiting room, every after-hours line, has been looked at by someone and identified as an opportunity. Someone qualified me by age. Someone built the six-layer transfer structure. Someone is collecting the per-call fee. The doctor doesn’t know it’s happening and the patient can’t get out.

I called the office the next morning. The receptionist had no idea what I was talking about. What likely happened is a documented form of telecom fraud, the after-hours call forwarding got hijacked and rerouted to an ad network without anyone’s consent.

No one calls a doctor after hours to be sold car insurance. And yet someone looked at that phone line, the one that exists specifically so a sick person can reach their doctor, and decided it was just another addressable market, that a desperate person’s phone call was ad inventory. That is malicious.

“Jessica” and “Emma” aren’t accidents. They are AI tools someone chose to deploy here, on this line, because the technology made it cheap enough to be worth doing. That’s the accelerant. It doesn’t require a villain twirling a mustache to pull this off anymore, just people making decisions about what to automate and where to point it, who decided that your fear and your need were a fine place to make some money.

That’s how a country dies, how a society dies. And the kicker? They’re going to force-feed us ads on our deathbeds as we try to reach our doctors. And after we die, Meta will keep our ghosts working so they can sell more ads.

I don’t want to leave you in a puddle of despair so I do have one small thing we can all do about this. My friend Ron J. Williams built something worth putting on your phone right now. His father got scammed out of his entire retirement through WhatsApp. Ron couldn't recover the money. So he built ScamHERO. You take a screenshot of a weird text, send it to the app, and it comes back with a verdict: real or scam, what to do, who to call, how to report it. I've been using it for months. Put it on your phone. Put it on your parents' phone. Put it on your in-laws' phone. We protect each other.

I’d bet some money I’m not the only one with a story like this. Sound off in the comments: what have you all been experiencing out there?

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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.

Before we jump in today, there’s something we can DO RIGHT NOW to help keep ourselves and each other a little bit safer.

Speaker Mike Johnson is fast-tracking a bill that will let the government surveil Americans with ChatGPT. A bipartisan group of Representatives is trying to stop him–we need to pressure all of Congress to join them this week.

The good folks at QuitGPT have tons of info you can read up on: CLICK HERE.

I know, nobody likes to make phone calls, but honestly: it’ll be over in 5 minutes and there’s a killer script you can read from at the link above. We don’t have a ton of ways to protect ourselves in this moment, but this is a real one.

Thanks to Cut Off the Spigot for sounding the alarm. We love doing this work in community.

Also, if you’re feeling ready to quit ChatGPT today, subscribe and we’ll send our “AI Go Bag” with the first easy steps straight to your inbox.

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Now for our regularly scheduled programming…

I was recently at dinner with my wife and a good friend. I should have been having a good time, but something felt off. It wasn’t anxiety or boredom, it was this low-grade sense of being behind, like somewhere else another version of my life was waiting for me to show up for it. And that’s when I realized: I was working. Not for a job, not for other people. I was working for my digital life.

Cue Severance theme music.

We talk about living two lives, online and offline, like they’re equal, but they’re not. The digital one is quietly running the other. Every meal is pre-production for content. Every beautiful place is documentation proving our presence in the beautiful place. Every conversation carries this background hum of what you’re going to do with it later.

Even online, it’s not just one life. It’s LinkedIn colleagues and Substack readers and Instagram peers and group chats and DMs; each one its own neighborhood with its own norms and its own version of you that’s overdue to show up.

The specific feeling that produces is: failing the people who are physically in your life. Not because you don’t care about them, but because you’ve committed to a level of care across so many places that no human being can actually keep up with.

And now AI is in the mix.

The bar for how fast and how constantly we’re expected to respond keeps rising, and these tools make it theoretically possible to meet that bar, so the expectation never comes back down. The pitch is that AI helps you respond and summarize and keep up and perform care at scale.

But is that our goal? Cosplaying connection?

What we’re losing is three relationships at once:

• the internal quiet that lets you hear yourself think

• the full presence that the people you love deserve from you

• and the connection to the actual natural world, the one with no engagement tracker, no algorithm punishing you for going quiet.

Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re late. She really doesn’t.

In the latest episode of Life With Machines on Youtube, we unearth:

• Why this isn’t a screen time problem but a relationship problem, and why the platforms are designed to make sure you never stop feeling behind.

• How maintaining separate identities across every platform and group chat creates a permanent background sense of relational debt toward the people physically in your life.

• Why the bar for responsiveness keeps rising, and what AI tools make possible that humans were never built to sustain.

• Why individual digital detox keeps failing, and what actually reduces the load: shared agreements with the people in your life about what presence and availability actually mean.

Watch it here:

Then tell us in the comments: where do you feel most relationally overwhelmed? Where do you feel stretched across too many versions of yourself? And what have you tried, alone or with others, to slow it down without dropping out entirely? We want to hear it.

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Thanks for being in this with us.

- Baratunde

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

Hi you,

So this is kind of a diary entry of my efforts to “defund fascism.” It’s less the polished version, more just…what’s actually been going on.

You can scroll on to read the update or feel free to listen to the uncensored voice note version of this post (full of feelings and swear words).

I’ve been at this for about five weeks now, the project I’ve been calling my defund journey. The idea is pretty simple even if the execution isn’t: I want to redirect what I think of as the DAM—my data, attention, and money—away from the platforms and companies making the world worse, and stop letting that current flow in directions I didn’t consciously choose. And then figure out where to actually plant seeds, not flags. I’m not interested in planting a flag, making a declaration, and moving on. Seeds require tending. They’re a commitment to something growing over time. (Can you tell I’m working on decolonizing my own mind and language? It’s hard but fun!)

When I first got fired up about this, I had visions of spreadsheets dancing in my head. Notion pages. Decision trees. I was going to build the Mother Of All Tables (a MOAT), sorted by fascist complicity, federal contracts, every naughty list I could find. Then, with that comprehensive map established, I would feel comfortable starting the journey. Very Virgo. Very overkill. What actually humbled me was just working on one thing at a time.

The ChatGPT migration

Breaking up with ChatGPT has been way bigger and way gnarlier than I expected. That’s where most of my hours have gone these past five weeks. The business account I shared with my assistant—cancelled, auto-pay off, neither of us really using it anymore. My personal account still has the $20/month running because I’m being careful about the data transition (more on that later), but the attention and data are gone. I killed the DA. The M is next.

I didn’t expect what the migration would teach me. I came in wanting to copy every single chat log over, and Claude basically said: you don’t need to do that. It’s about distillation, not total migration. Keep what matters, leave the rest. That’s actually a pretty good operating principle for this whole project.

By the way…

We created a little gift to help you take that first step. Our AI Go Bag bag is an easy, step-by-step guide to migrating from ChatGPT to Claude and taking your essential data with you (it’s yours, if Sam Altman can have it…so should you!).

Just subscribe to the newsletter, and get it for free as our welcome gift!

Subscribe now

Here’s roughly where things stand:

Done or in progress:

• ChatGPT business account: cancelled. Personal account: money still running but attention and data redirected.

• Amazon: still a Prime member, but the mental pole position is gone. I’m thinking less last-minute, buying less overall, and the money is way down. Kindle is next, but that’s a harder goodbye—I’m planning to shift my library to Calibre and Libby (with audiobooks to Libro.fm) and eventually swap the hardware for a Kobo reader.

• Apps and location services on my iPhone: did a full audit, found some ugly stuff (more on that below), made changes.

• Shopping locally: actively choosing it, exploring it, finding it genuinely good for my soul.

• Travel: back to public transit when I can. Subway from the airport. Local taxis. Less carbon inside cities, more human contact.

Not touched yet:

• Google. It’s everywhere—every project, every collaboration, fifteen people in shared docs across multiple organizations. That’s a collective migration, not a personal one. I know what it would take and I’m not there yet. Not-so-secretly hoping the company gets divided into more competitive entities for the betterment of all before I start moving lol.

• Amazon Prime membership formally: still running. Cancellation pending me actually making the Virgo checklist.

The internet situation

This is where it gets personal.

I’m a broadband nerd. I believe symmetric data speeds are a sign of civilization and anything less is basically a human rights violation. When I lived in LA I had Sonic, fast independent fiber. People would come to my house just to upload files. I lived in the future.

Then I moved to Palm Springs and I live in America now. 1Gbps down, 40 megabits up. I feel my pixels degrading on every Zoom call. I don’t want people to see me like this!

So when I did an audit of my apps, I was already primed to care about this stuff. And I found something gross. The Speedtest app I’d been using constantly for years turned out to be owned by Ziff Davis/Ookla, which had become a major ad network and data broker. Every test I ran, they were logging my location and selling it to enterprise companies to target me. I should have known. I switched to SpeedSmart, I pay for it, and I feel cleaner. Ziff Davis then sold the whole property to Accenture so enterprises can use all that data to optimize whatever rapacious thing they want to optimize…good timing on getting out.

The VPN I was already using turned out to be solid. No logs, no required account, no credit card. They can only snitch with what they know, so the less they know, the better.

And then there’s the bigger project, which is actually trying to fix my internet situation at home and get free of Spectrum. I’ve been working on this for about five years. I’ve talked to the provider, I know what they need to light us up with fiber. Now I’m slowly going door to door with my neighbors—most of whom are older and don’t particularly need screaming upload speeds for their media files. So there’s a whole sales pitch happening. I’m leading with resale value. We could be the envy of the town. It is very slow. But it feels like the right kind of slow—collective, local, actually trying to build something rather than just consume differently. Check with me in six months to see if I’m still sounding patient.

The thing at the shop

This one didn’t involve any money at all, and it’s the one I keep coming back to. I was in a local store and saw a product I wanted to photograph and post online. Before I did, I asked the owner if that was okay. He lit up. Told me what he actually hates is when other shop owners come in, take pictures of stuff he flew to New York to source, and then sell it cheaper online without so much as a finder’s fee. He said: yes, please tag us. We both walked away feeling better. I didn’t buy anything. No dollars changed hands, but something did.

When I’m buying random stuff off Amazon, nobody feels better: not me, not the drop shipper grinding it out on the other end. We’re just both running the machine. This was different. I looked a human in the eye, asked consent for something that implicated them, and got to actually know them for a minute. That counts for something. I think it counts for overnight shipping, at least.

Now it’s your turn: what have you been up to? What’s been easy? Which goodbyes have felt hard, or even impossible? And has anything uniquely human happened to you along the way?

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More dispatches from the defund journey to come.

–Baratunde

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

Alexa is the creator of Cut Off the Spigot, a Substack that goes category by category to find alternatives to badly behaving corporations. For the past year, she’s been doing the research most of us don’t have time for, and this conversation is about how to actually use it.

The frustration you’re feeling right now? Alexa says it’s decades in the making. Corporate consolidation, wages squeezed, services degraded, and your money funding the very forces you’re fighting. Like Chappell Roan, this movement didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s just reached a boiling point.

In this episode, we get into:

• How Alexa built Cut Off the Spigot, starting with pet supplies and gardening, and working her way through 40+ industries including ring cameras, ISPs, and companies with active ICE contracts

• The difference between a boycott and a migration, and why “toward something” matters as much as “away from”

• What enshittification actually looks like at the corporate level, and the Norwegian consumer protection video you need to see

• Why internet service providers are the category that “kind of broke” her, and how to think about unavoidable monopolies without surrendering entirely

• How to evaluate a company’s harm by size and volume, not just association, and how the ICE/Hilton franchise situation in Minneapolis shows exactly how that pressure works

• Why repairing a pair of boots feels as good as buying new ones

Watch or listen above, then tell us in the comments: what’s the one product, service, or platform you’re most stuck on right now, the one you can’t figure out how to leave?

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Thank you to Alexa Speed for bringing the receipts and the roadmap! Follow and subscribe to her work at Cut Off The Spigot on all platforms.

Finally, we made you something special. We’re calling it your AI Go Bag: a step-by-step guide to migrating from ChatGPT to Claude. This is an evolving project and there’s a ton of support coming your way but this is the very first step. It’s gonna walk you through a super simple process for collecting just what you need from ChatGPT to get out the door and introduce yourself to Claude (or another LLM or none at all!). Subscribe below and we’ll send it straight to your inbox!

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Excited to be on this journey with you all, TOGETHER.

Stay free,

Baratunde

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

Last August, we wrote what became the most-shared post in the history of this newsletter at the time: Why AI is NOT Taking Your Job or Doing Anything Itself. The argument was simple: people are making decisions to fire workers, and people are blaming AI for those decisions. The rest of us are being trained to fear the wrong thing.

In the months since, the world has gone out of its way to prove us right.

Jack Dorsey just cut Block’s workforce nearly in half (this is the firm behind Square and Cash App). He said AI tools mean his company can “do more and do it better” with fewer people. Block’s stock surged 15% on the announcement. Oracle is reportedly planning to eliminate up to 30,000 jobs to free up billions for AI data center expansion. And across the economy, January 2026 saw the highest monthly job cuts since 2009.

But when you dig into those cuts beneath the shiny headlines, AI is explicitly cited in only 8% of cuts. Harvard Business Review calls bullshit saying companies are firing folks over the potential of AI, not anything real yet. Even Scam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and temporary oligarch, tried to walk back his own fearmongering about how AI is gonna up-end the world by stating publicly that companies are “AI washing” their layoffs, using the technology as a scapegoat for decisions they would have made anyway.

So the people building AI are telling you that the people using AI to justify firing you are lying about AI. Yeah, it’s ok if you need to read that again.

While our August 2025 newsletter named the problem, it didn’t fully explore the deeper questions like:

• How do powerful people use language to hide behind their tools?

• What would it actually look like to rethink not just layoffs, but the entire concept of a job?

• What’s the bigger, bolder future we could build instead of just defending the present?

So I made a video. It’s 20 minutes of me working through all of this: the grammar of blame (with a lesson I learned from writer that changed how I see every headline), the shell game companies are running, Octavia Butler’s reminder that change is the only constant, and a vision for what comes next that goes way beyond “adapt or die”

Watch it. Share it. And if you’ve lost a job where your boss blamed AI, I want to hear from you in the comments, here or on YouTube. What words did they use? Did they believe what they were saying?

If this resonates, subscribe to Life With Machines on YouTube.

Talk soon.

-- Baratunde

Thanks to our Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts. And to the folks at Hooked Media for the YouTubification of our intentions.

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What she laid out was clarifying in the best and worst possible way. We are not approaching a dangerous future: we are living inside one that was built slowly around us, without us noticing.

Here’s some of what we got into:

• What cognitive liberty actually means and why the rights we have now weren’t built for a world that can read your face, track your eyes, and decode your intentions before you act on them

• The technology that’s already here. Meta’s neural wristband at Best Buy. Apple’s $1.5 billion acquisition of software that reads silent speech from micro-movements of your jaw. Cameras layered with emotional recognition software.

• How we got here. Not through force, but through convenience. Decade by decade, hundreds of terms of service we didn’t read.

• Who gets experimented on first. Refugee populations, low-income communities, people who can’t say no, and how that data then scales to everyone else.

• These companies want read/write access to your brain. The same technology that tracks your mood, attention, and emotional state can be used to steer your behavior, modulate what you feel, and manipulate what you do next.

• What it would actually take to protect our mental privacy — the laws we'd need and the design choices that should be illegal.

• Where the hope is. Because Nita brought some, and we need it.

Watch it! Then sound off in the comments: where have you felt this slow creep? And where in your life can you better protect yourself?

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A huge thank you to Nita! Don’t forget to follow her at Thinking Freely for the kind of clear-eyed, rigorous thinking your brain deserves.

And make sure you’re subscribed to us here at Life With Machines, where we explore how humans can live well with tech, not just endure it!

Subscribe now

Stay free,

Baratunde

Thanks to producers Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support and to my executive assistant Mae Abellanosa.

As part of the effort to defund fascism and fund a more free future, I’ve been moving from ChatGPT to Claude. Most of our team is making the shift, and we’ll soon be offering direct guidance on the best ways to make the transition. None of these companies is perfect, but Anthropic is better (safer for kids, better performance in our experience, and not directly funding a fascist government).

They also have been putting out badass ads. But the best ad to me was the fact that the so-called “Department of War” of the United States, led by Pete Hegseth, is threatening to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk because of its refusal to allow use of its technology for fully autonomous weapons (aka murder-bots) and mass surveillance. I recorded this video Wednesday from New York City’s Penn Station as I was traveling just to do a small part in urging the company not to fold.

Good news. They held the line. The company’s full statement is available here. Some choice quotes:

in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do

using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties.

frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk

MEANWHILE LETS TALK ABOUT ACCELERATION

A few months ago I started breaking down my “Three As” of AI: Accelerate, Augment, and Accommodate. There are two parts to the question of AI and acceleration. In part one, I questioned the value of speeding things up in the first place, challenging the premise that faster is always better.

The second part of the argument is to question whether AI actually delivers net speed improvements.

AI was supposed to give us our time back and offer fewer tedious tasks, more creativity, more freedom. Maybe even more life. It often does not. But this isn’t new.

There is a long history of “time-saving” technology, from the Industrial Revolution to the vacuum cleaner to the BlackBerry, but the truth is we have never gotten the promised returns of more free time. We just get more work.

Every time this promise is made, expectations rise, workloads expand, and the benefits flow upward.

So what’s really going on? Who actually benefits when work becomes “more efficient”? And what would it look like to make a better promise?

That’s what we explore in my latest long form YouTube video on our new, dedicated, Life With Machines channel. Watch below, and help us grow our YouTube channel by subscribing, liking the video, and leaving a comment there if you’re so moved.

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But there’s a question I kept coming back to: how is this even legal?

I spent the week digging into patent law, post-mortem data rights, and AI regulation across eight jurisdictions (with significant help from Claude). What I found is both infuriating and, in a weird way, hopeful.

Infuriating because the US is structurally incapable of saying no to this patent. Hopeful because a lot of other countries already have the tools to block it, restrict it, or punish it. And a legal concept is emerging that didn’t exist five years ago: the right to be left dead.

This post is an exclusive for paid subscribers. Thank you for your support. It helps us keep making this Life With Machines thing which is a self-funded operation!

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Last week we started getting some truly unpleasant news reports: on December 30th while we were still nursing a holiday hangover, the United States Patent Office quietly handed Meta a piece of paper that said: legally that company owns the idea of keeping dead people posting.

Patent US12513102B2, “Simulation of a User of a Social Networking System Using a Language Model” – filed November 29, 2023, granted December 30, 2025.

Primary inventor: Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer.

Not an intern or a rogue research team. The CTO.

This is happening, by the way, the same week Zuckerberg was in a Los Angeles courtroom testifying in a civil suit brought by a young woman who says Instagram’s addictive design features harmed her mental health as a child. The judge warned that recording in the courtroom would result in contempt charges, after at least two people in Zuckerberg’s entourage were spotted wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. Same company. Same inhumane infrastructure. Different room.

Let me walk you through what this actually says–the patent itself, not the press release.

The “Problem” Meta Identified

Here’s the framing in the patent’s own words. Notice what they decided was the problem worth solving:

“If that user is absent from the social networking platform, the users connected to the user do not receive any content from the user during that user’s absence. A user may be absent from the social networking platform for a long period of time, thereby affecting the user experience of several users on the social networking system.”

Already I have questions: if I take a break from social media for, say, mental health reasons, does Meta get to decide when my break is over? But then:

“The impact on the users is much more severe and permanent if that user is deceased and can never return to the social networking platform.”

Read that again.

In the problem statement of a patent–the section that explains why this technology needs to exist–Meta identifies death as a content-gap problem. The severity they’re measuring is the impact on… the feed. Not on the grieving family. Not on the deceased person’s dignity. On the feed.

These guys think your life and death are problems to be solved. That your lack of monetizable content output is the real tragedy. And this is their solution.

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What the Technology Actually Does

The patent describes an AI bot trained on “everything.” Posts, comments, likes, voice messages, DMs–plus your browsing history, location check-ins, purchases, and app usage. Your ghost isn’t trained on your social media personality. It’s trained on your entire surveilled digital life.

“The language model is trained based on past user interactions by the target user and therefore generates responses and content that the target user would have provided in a given context if the target user was available to respond. As a result, the other users may not notice an absence of the target user even though the responses are generated by the bot.”

Other users may not notice. That is not a side effect. That is the stated design goal. The system is explicitly built to be indistinguishable from you– again, just to be extra clear: while you are dead.

And it doesn’t wait to be talked to. The bot continuously scans your newsfeed, selects content, and engages.

It initiates direct messages. It slides into people’s DMs. With your name on it. The filing also references simulation of audio and video calls. Your voice. Your face. Calling your friends. Deepfakes of dead people. That’s the idea they want to legally protect. WTAF.

And then there’s the detail no news report has covered:

The patent describes training multiple language models for the same user at different ages. A model for you at 20, another at 25, another at 30. Each trained only on data collected up to that age. Meta isn’t preserving a person. They’re building a library of versions of you. Who decides which “you” gets resurrected? They do.

The bot also calibrates intimacy–generating different responses based on relationship type (family vs. friend), “affinity scores,” profile attributes including age, ethnicity, gender, and relationship status, and whether the interaction falls near a birthday or holiday. Your ghost performs closeness differently for your mother than for your college friend. Based on relationship labels you may never have updated.

And there is no off switch. The architecture is an explicit continuous loop with no exit condition. No conditions described for stopping. No sunset provision. The patent doesn’t expire until 2043, but I assume they have a patent for the automatic digital life extension of dead patents.

But Wait, What About Consent?

There is a consent provision: while alive, you can specify which data goes into building your ghost–maybe public posts but not your DMs. That’s the whole framework. Set it up before you die, and trust that Meta will remember to honor it.

But here’s the asymmetry the patent’s own language reveals. You can prevent your DMs to your mom from training the model, but you can’t prevent the model from sending new DMs to your mom. You can exclude data from training. But you cannot exclude your family from receiving simulated messages, and they can’t opt out. So… trauma as a service? How’s that for a twist on SaaS.

There is one line about transparency, buried deep in the filing–it mentions responses could “indicate that the responses were not actually generated by the target user.” But this is described as one possible version of the system, not a requirement. Compare that with the stated design goal: “the other users may not notice.” The stated goal is deception. The disclosure is an afterthought in an optional embodiment.

The patent also allows pulling in data from third-party systems–email, voice messages, outside interactions–with, in the filing’s words, “a user’s consent.” The consent of a user who, just to keep us all on the same page, is dead.

What Meta Said (And What They Didn’t)

Meta’s spokesperson gave Business Insider one sentence: “We have no plans to move forward with this example.” That’s it. No explanation of why Bosworth filed it. No commitment about the future.

And no answer to another obvious question: if there are no plans, why, in September 2024, did Meta file an international PCT application seeking worldwide protection for this exact technology? You don’t spend money expanding a filing globally if you have “no plans.”

One more detail: the patent is assigned to Meta Platforms Technologies LLC–not the main company. That’s the hardware and AR/VR division. Reality Labs. The one building the metaverse. Imagine encountering your dead friend’s avatar in a VR space, having a conversation, and not knowing they’ve been dead for three years.

Compare that to Microsoft, which was granted a similar patent in 2020. When it surfaced publicly, Microsoft’s general manager of AI programs, Tim O’Brien, called it “disturbing” and said it predated the company’s current ethics review processes. Translation: we have since decided this crosses a line.

Meta offered no such acknowledgment. Just: no current plans. Which means: we own it, and we’re waiting. For you to die. Then we’ll shove a virtual feeding tube into your digital body so you can keep producing for us.

Why This Patent Exists (The Honest Answer)

Dead accounts are valuable. You have literally become a profitable asset—and you’re worth more dead, because you can’t complain, can’t log off, can’t opt out. It’s the botification of real people.

Here’s the main draw: if a deceased user’s account hasn’t been memorialized or deleted, it stays “active” in Meta’s ad-serving system–receiving targeted ads, generating impressions, paying advertisers. If Meta can make that account actually engage–respond to posts, pull people into threads, create interactions–it becomes a revenue-producing asset. Your ghost, monetized.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute have projected that dead users could outnumber living users on Facebook by 2070. By 2025, the US alone was projected to have as many as 63.9 million deceased Facebook accounts, according to an analysis building on Oxford Internet Institute research. That number is only going in one direction.

What This Actually Is

We’ve been worried about AI grief tech hacking something essentially human about loss since the very beginning of Life With Machines–ironically, we now know, around the same time Meta was quietly filing this patent. And even the most controversial grief tech companies–Replika, HereAfter AI–are at least overt about what they are and how their consent structure works. This is something else.

Researchers at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence have already named three harm scenarios for what they call “deadbots”: a dead grandmother’s voice being used to serve ads, children being distressed by an AI insisting a dead parent is still present, and users being powerless to shut down a simulation their deceased loved one contractually authorized. Meta’s patent describes the infrastructure that makes all three possible.

Here’s what the careful bureaucratic language of the patent is designed to obscure:

When an artist like Prince dies, the music keeps generating revenue. That money goes to his family, his estate. Because the law recognizes that a person’s creative output, their likeness, their labor, belongs to them and their heirs.

Meta’s model is the opposite. Everything you ever posted, every comment, every DM, every voice message–all the labor you performed on their platform for free–they’ve already profited from while you were alive. That’s the original terms of the deal we never actually agreed to: your attention and your data in exchange for “free” access to a platform. The wage theft was always baked in. We just called it social media. Now they want to keep collecting after the funeral.

The money from your ghost’s engagement doesn’t go to your family. It goes to Mark Zuckerberg (or his immortal life extended corporate self in the form of Meta). Your digital remains performing labor they designed, generating revenue they collect, in perpetuity, with no mechanism for it to stop. That’s post-mortem wage theft. Extracting value from ghosts.

Humans are merely another natural resource to be extracted from, even when we’re not human anymore. They’ve mined us to build a digital version and there’s no reason for digital-you to ever stop working.

Call me crazy, but I’d like to be treated as a “person” instead of just a “user.”

I really mean that. As a descendent of people who were not considered that, but instead treated as property, I’m deeply disgusted by the parallels this patent has to U.S. chattel slavery. The company is not seeing us as human beings with connections to other humans. It is only seeing us as sources of digital labor and profit for shareholders. The United States innovated on the model of enslavement, making it lifelong and hereditary. Meta has sadly decided to operate in this same morally bankrupt tradition. I’m disgusted by this, and we all should be.

One More Thing

You might be asking: how is this even legal?

Short answer: the US patent system cannot ask whether an invention is ethical. The examiner’s job was to verify no one had previously described this exact system. The question of whether simulating dead people to deceive the living violates human dignity was never asked, because the institution has no mandate to ask it.

But the European Patent Office does have a morality clause, and has used it aggressively. France has had post-mortem digital rights since 2016. China requires consent for AI simulation of a person’s identity. Legal scholars across multiple countries are now converging on something called “the right to be left dead.”

Meta filed its patent in the one country that couldn’t say no, and is seeking international protection in countries that might.

I did a deep dive into the global legal landscape for paid subscribers. Which countries could block this. Which ones can’t. What rights you do and don’t have depending on where you live. And the emerging legal framework that might, eventually, give all of us the right to stay dead when we die.

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P.S. If you found this useful, forward it to someone you’d prefer not to be replaced by an algorithm–at least while you’re still here.

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Thanks to Associate Producer Layne Deyling Cherland for editorial and patent research support and to my executive assistant Mae Abellanosa.

Big news: Life with Machines is now on YouTube in its own dedicated channel (no more freeloading off my YouTube!). This feels a little ironic given what we’re talking about in our first video, but here we are…using the machine to rage against the machine.

Lord Zuckerberg’s Master Plan

Let me paint you a picture: Mark Zuckerberg took our human friendships and ground them down to a fine pulp. His algorithm made us hate the people we actually know and love. And now? Now he’s manufacturing synthetic friends so he can monetize that too.

First, Facebook flattened friendship into a binary; you’re either “friends” or you’re not, and everyone from your boss to your ex to your actual best friend gets the same label. Then the algorithm decided which of your “friends” you’d actually see, turning your relationships into engagement metrics. And now, in the final boss move, Big Tech is pushing AI companions as the solution to the loneliness epidemic they created.

It’s almost beautiful in its audacity. Almost.

But Wait, There’s Hope

Here’s the thing: the dystopian future Zuckerberg and Big Tech have imagined doesn’t have to be our reality. And that’s what this video is really about.

We dig into how we got here (it’s a wild ride through Facebook friend requests from your boss, the News Feed’s assault on chronology, and the commodification of literally everything). But more importantly, we explore what we could build instead.

I’m talking about tech that actually supports human relationships instead of replacing them. Tools that help you coordinate with friends, not algorithms that decide which friends you get to see. Platforms designed for intimacy and context, not infinite scale and engagement. Technology that knows when to get out of the way.

The video covers:

• How Facebook systematically destroyed different dimensions of friendship

• Why AI companions are a feature, not a bug, of social media’s business model

• Real alternatives that are being built right now by people who actually give a damn (❤️ to and Roundabout)

• What it looks like to refuse to let this version of online become our total reality

Your Mission (Should You Choose to Accept It)

Watch the video. Do subscribe to the channel if you’re into it. But more than that—and I mean this—don’t just hit like and subscribe. We’re not Lord Zuckerberg over here:

Text a friend. Call somebody. Share something this brought up for you with a real person in your life. Let’s figure out a new way to play this game together.

Because here’s what I know to be true: We are living beings. We are alive for so much more than turning billionaires into trillionaires or driving charts up and to the right into oblivion. We deserve healthier relationships with ourselves, with other people, with Mother Nature herself.

We need to touch grass. Literally.

Nintendo Wii had it right back in 2006: “Why not take a break?” Let’s all press that plus button and figure out a new way to play.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

And then? Close this tab. Go talk to someone you love.

- Baraunde

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Thanks to Associate Producer Layne Deyling Cherland for editorial and production support and to my executive assistant Mae Abellanosa.

It may be common, but it is not normal or healthy.

And yet, the only reason many of us know what’s happening in places like Minneapolis, LA, Portland, Chicago and beyond is because people are using their phones to bear witness; showing us the reality that those in power are actively trying to deny, distort, and dismiss. The manipulation of images and the erosion of trust are not new tactics, but the speed, scale, and realism of this moment are.

Sam Gregory is an internationally recognized human rights advocate and the executive director of WITNESS, whose global mission is to harness the power of video to “fortify the truth.” Sam joined me this week to talk about how we can responsibly respond to what we’re seeing on our phones and, for those of us on the ground in ICE-occupied cities, record what we’re seeing safely and effectively.

Check out the whole conversation above and the practical bullet points below:

When you’re scrolling…

Pause before you engage.
There is no obligation to watch violence. You are not required to repeatedly expose yourself to traumatic imagery in order to be informed or morally engaged. Before watching or sharing, pause and ask whether you are ready to be in that space. Protecting your nervous system is not apathy. Vicarious trauma is real and choosing not to watch doesn’t mean you don’t care.

Don’t try to do this alone.
We are better witnesses in community. The most effective and safest frontline witnesses are embedded in community where people can assess risk, make decisions together, and support one another. The same applies online. Look to trusted communities and networks to help interpret what you’re seeing, rather than trying to verify everything alone.

Don’t take the rage bait.
A lot of what circulates now is designed to make us angry and impulsive. Techniques we were once told to use to spot fake content–pixel peeping, obvious glitches, six fingers–don’t reliably work anymore. And when we’re angry, we’re less discerning. Slow down. See whether credible sources and multiple perspectives corroborate what you’re seeing.

Context matters more than virality.
Ask basic questions: where did this come from? When was it recorded? Is it being re-circulated without context? Reposted footage–or “shallow fakes”–can mislead even when the original video was real.

You are allowed not to share.
This is not a spectator sport. Sharing content is not a requirement, and it’s not neutral. Consider whether amplifying something could put someone at risk or contribute to confusion rather than clarity.

If you’re filming on the ground…

Start with risk assessment.
Different people face different levels of danger based on how they’re perceived, their citizenship status, or their proximity to enforcement. In group situations, roles can be shared–some people closer, some farther away capturing wider context. Think about personal risk before pressing record.

Prepare your device.
Disable Face ID and fingerprint unlocking (both of which you can be forced to use). Memorize which number you’d call if something goes wrong. Make sure your content is backing up securely. All of these reduce the chance that footage can be seized, deleted, or used to harm someone.

Know your rights…and their limits.
In most of the U.S., you have a First Amendment right to film in public, but that doesn’t mean authorities will respect it. You don’t have the right to interfere, and you may be ordered to step back. Rules can differ near borders and ports of entry, so inform yourself.

Film with intention.
Be clear about what you’re trying to document. Capture context: where you are, when this is happening, who is recording. Wide shots, visible landmarks or signs, multiple angles–all of this helps establish what actually occurred and supports verification later.

Let the footage speak.
Limit commentary, especially up close. Anything said on camera can become admissible or expose people to risk. Avoid naming individuals or speculating about someone’s immigration status. Silence can be protective.

Think before you share.
Ask whether sharing immediately helps or harms. In many cases, holding footage back, even temporarily, can protect vulnerable people and preserve the integrity of the evidence, especially when official accounts are likely to be false.

Preserve the record.
Save the original file without altering it or changing the filename. Keep three copies, in two different places, with one shared with someone you trust (the 3-2-1 rule). This protects metadata and maintains a chain of custody. Careful archiving contributes to accountability over time, even if justice is delayed.

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Here are a bunch of resources from Sam if you want to dig deeper:

Filming Immigration Enforcement in the U.S.

Tips for Documenting & Sharing Footage

How To Use AI Detection Tools

How AI detection Tools Failed in 2025

Transformer

Sora is here. The window to save visual truth is closing

OpenAI’s release of the generative video model Sora 2 and its related social network signals a major turning point in how we understand and trust visual truth. How we choose to act now will determine whether our shared basis for reality — what we see and hear — remains trustworthy…

Read more

6 months ago · 2 likes

When we lose trust in what we’re seeing, we disengage. And disengagement is a gift to those in power.

Witnessing, done carefully and collectively, is one of the ways we resist that erosion of reality. It may not deliver immediate justice, but it builds a record–both moral and literal–that the future depends on.

We are in this together. Tell us how you’re doing in the comments so we can support each other.

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Sending love and strength to you and your community, wherever you are.

-Baratunde

Thanks to Associate Producer Layne Deyling Cherland for editorial and production support and to my executive assistant Mae Abellanosa.