Hey all,
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!
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.
Stay human,
— Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
