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?

Leave a comment

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

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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?

Leave a comment

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

Hi you…

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21 days 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?

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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?

Leave a comment

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!

Subscribe now

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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-- 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.