michael-dean-k/

Anti-AI sentiment is escalating: the Pause AI movement, state-level data center bans, molotov cocktails at Sam Altman's house, artists going to dumb phones, witch hunts for AI prose. Protesting and boycotting AI, at a personal level, is the exact wrong approach. It misunderstands the Luddites. They were not against the machines in principle, they were against the factory owners not sharing the profits of the factory. This is possibly about to play out a grand scale: AI and robotics labs could capture nearly all economic value, and there will be a plea to nationalize these companies and redistribute the profits.

While the scope and effects here are way bigger, the workers of the Industrial Revolution were far more disempowered. You couldn't "just do things." You could operate someone else's machine, but you couldn't just spin up a competing factory; that required land, resources, labor, none of which you had. There was just a certain amount of capital needed to compete, and it wasn't possible. Workers were limited to being workers, so they had no choice but to revolt with violence.

The difference today is that the worker and artist suddenly have access to build-your-own-factory tooling. A single person for $100/month can compete with companies valued in the millions and billions. It's asymmetric labor. Regular people can build civilization scale infrastructure, distribution labels, social media engines, software, etc. Never before has there been a democratic opportunity for people to self-organize into their own collectives, tribes, governments, and whatnot.

At least to me, this kind of optimism—principled, delirious, ambitious, but still careful and skeptical—is better than the cynicism of the "resist" factions. There is nothing you or your circles gain by putting your head in the sand; it brings a distanced, crabby, virtue-signaled posture that does nothing to change the actual situation. You gain nothing by staying on the ChatGPT free plan on default settings and complaining no how it's an ineffective, incapable, sycophant. It requires an ounce of nuance, to be critical of how the labs act, but to then use that lab's best tools towards your own sovereignty and vision.

I think what I'm trying to get at here is that the Luddites of the 21st-century will not be reverting back to typewriters and flip phones, they will be wielding AI tools in ways to foster human connection, and the kind of pro-human cultural that the Internet originally promised, but was never realized under capitalism.

When we say we "distrust institutions," we're pointing at the wrong thing; it's the institutes that are withering. We use these words interchangeably, but I think the separation clarifies.

An "institution" is an abstract, permanent, inter-generational primitive—like education, marriage, the free press, the essay—while an "institute" is a concrete embodiment that serves it. Think of an institution as a societal organ. Think of institutes as the specialized tissue that keep the organ functioning and regenerating.

As generations turn, new sets of people are handed down the great responsibility to protect and evolve institutes through the storms of time and technology. Without upgrading our institutes, society goes through slow-motion organ failure, with phantom pains and spiritual malaise that can't be traced back to the source. Schools still look like schools, but everyone is cheating through a Homework Apocalypse, and suddenly we have all sorts of cultural cancers that seem inevitable. Institutes are the civic building blocks of a sane society, and yet we glorify unicorns who create "value" but feel no responsibility for their dying elders.

Institutes operate through the inverse of market logic. Where startups are designed to accrue all of the upside, an institute is sacrificial, designed so society gets the upside, even at its own peril. Of course they swim in the same water, but institutes swim differently: they have opposite answers to questions on how to steer, what to make, where to focus, who to include, and when to stop. An attempt at some principles:

• mission-driven, not market-driven;
• timeless contributions, not self-serving content;
• involved in ecosystem building, not niche extraction;
• active members, not passive users;
• century-long legacy, not liquidity through an exit.

Usually an institute comes from patronage: you can’t resist market currents unless you’re supported by endowments, donations, foundations, tuitions, grants, and such things. You can’t start an institute in your garage, but now with AI and the collapse of cost, I suppose you could try. So many of the one-person AI company fantasies are about a single founder reaching a billion-dollar valuation, which is the cheapest form of ambition there is; the better question is around the scale and spirit of cultural impact achievable by a one-person micro-institute.

Earlier today I did a Q&A with London Writer's Salon, and here's a list of points I sent to Lindsey in advance to share with her where my thinking was on the topic:

1. Techno-selectivism is the idea that you need to judge a technology by how it aligns with your virtues. This means you’re open to cutting-edge tools, yet you also revert back to analog tools, because you’ve experimented and understood the effects first hand. After trying the Apple Vision Pro (a cutting-edge VR headset), I realized that I wasn’t being mindful enough about the technology in my life, and so I made a list of the analog equivalent of every app in my iPhone, and tried a “Technology Zero” experiment. It went as extreme as not using clocks for a month (by scrambling each device, and setting my lock screen to Cambodian). I realized that something as integrated and unquestioned as a clock can have strong effects: by knowing the time every few minutes, I could micro-manage my time over the next hour, effortlessly, which led me to live in a “manager” mode, instead of a more embodied “maker” mode. Someone who is a techno-selectivist comes to idiosyncratic conclusions: I try not to use GPS, but I think the Meta Rayban glasses are fine. I value handwriting but am open to machine consciousness. The idea is to understand your virtues well enough so that you have a unique way to assess technology. When it comes to AI in writing, we need to understand what we lose and gain by having it assist/automate different parts of our process.

2. The 5 levels of writing technology: I found a book on my grandfather’s book shelf, from the 80s, written by William Zinser, that seemed to cover the hype and paranoia of Writing With a Word Processor. There have been maybe five big advances in writing: Voice > Handwriting > Typewriters > Computers > AI. You could argue that the shift from handwriting to typewriters had tremendous cognitive effects on the psyche, many of them negative. The backspace key of wordprocessors, also, has consequences. I don’t think a generation can ever avoid the latest paradigm they are in, instead, they need to go fully backwards and forward through the technology’s history. I have 4 typewriters and have written maybe 100 essays on them. I use voice/journals too. But also, I need to push the boundaries in what is possible with AI (ie: can I use my one million words of essays to create a machine consciousness that’s anchored in my ideas?)

3. The Kubler-Ross spectrum of AI grief: This model about grieving applies to AI existentialism. There’s a great NOEMA article about using this spectrum for AI progress, and I think we can be more specific in applying this to writers. Out of everyone, I think writers are having the hardest time dealing with the rise of AI. The spectrum goes from Denial> Anger> Bargaining> Depression> Acceptance. Most writers are still in the Denial phase (“AI is just a machine, a stochastic parrot doing autocomplete, they have no soul and will never write anything of value”). Anger takes the form of shaming and cancelling those who talk about it. Bargaining takes the form of “I’ll use it for X, but never Y,” until new upgrades force them to constantly re-evaluate. Depression is when you question the value in pursuing a career as a writer. Acceptance is when you just submit to the slop, and use AI to hack the algorithm. These are all forms of grief, and the goal really is to get to a non-grief state; where no matter what happens with AI, you are confident in the reasons that you write. It puts you in a place where you are not reactive and scared of what’s coming, but open to experimentation.

4. The cost of auto-complete. The time you save by using AI as a shortcut is the time you rob yourself of transformation. By writing, you see what’s in your mind/soul, and by editing, you can actually change what you believe. It should be slow. In the crafting of sentences, you are both forced to confront the limits of thoughts and expression. To me, this is one of the core parts of the human experience, it’s the point, not a thing to automate. I think you can use AI to surround this process—to help with research, operations, argument, feedback—but only if it enriches your presence within your ideas. If you use AI right, it should make your process longer, harder, and more fulfilling, because it’s enabling you to go farther than if you didn’t have it. I think essay writing is a form of personal sovereignty: by committing to the process, you gain independence over what you believe and how you act. I imagine that once AGI/ASI come around, essay writing could become something of a mainstream thing; similar to how gyms become popular once physical work got automated; writing might get more popular once intellectual work gets automated.

5. Writers can embrace AI as techno-activists: Typically software is made by engineers and entrepreneurs who can gain power by understanding and manipulating the market. But now, the main medium to write software is through prose, and it costs almost nothing. I think this opens a new era of mission-driven software; where people build for social/educational purposes, and not just attention capture. Writers are well-positioned for this, because they are the ones who can articulate and detail ideas with specificity. They’re at an advantage. If someone thinks that Substack is heading in the wrong direction (ie: Substack TV), you can spin up a new million-person writer-focused social network for probably less than $100,000/year in cost. Wild stuff. So an unexpected side-effect of this is grassroots software inspired by a new ethic. It’s ironic, because the attention monoliths stole data to create AI, but now that same AI might destroy their monopolies of attention.

6. AI tools can make technique accessible. The last 30-years of popular creativity advice has swayed towards process. From The Artist’s Way to The Creative Act, the dominant attitude is that creativity is therapy, catharsis, and spirituality—rationality and technique only get in the way. This is a harmful simplification. Both halves are equally important, but it’s much easier to promote an “all you have to show up” attitude to a mass market. These ideas of art-as-therapy became popular right when the Internet emerged, which meant there was a new demographic of people who could self-publish; these people weren’t about to spend 5 years in design school, and so the importance of technique was underplayed. AI can change the economics of teaching art/design/composition. If writing can be measured, then someone can upload a few drafts; and then software can understand their skill gaps and create a custom curriculum, custom exercises, a custom reading list of 20 essays (ones that match their strengths, but also elevate their weaknesses). 

7. We have the responsibility to shape our own algorithms. Companies already use AI against us, shaping opaque algorithms that tap into our subconscious via fear/outrage/desire/etc. Everyone is becoming jaded by this, but conveniently, it’s now possible to build our own algorithms. We could reward things we actually care about, whether it’s skill, relevance, originality, vulnerability, etc. So the benefit of quantifying writing is that we can discover it. I think writers have a queasiness around numbers. I specificallly dislike engagement metrics (likes, views, etc.), but if we could quantify the things that matter to us, we can take control of what we discover. There is so much good writing in the gutters of Substack, but the algorithm rewards engagement, popularity, and monetization.

8. Quality is the transcendence of categories. A big question of mine is how we can collectively determine what is good. Of course, each reader has subjective opinions. Even a particular judge has their own slant. So the 2025 Essay Architecture Prize had a unique approach to this. There were 3 branches: an AI looked at essay composition, a team of 8 judges (each representing a distinct sphere of Internet culture), and then a guest judge. Each essay on the shortlist got a score by all 3 branches, 1-100, and so the winners were the ones who appealed to different branches and transcended a particular taste pocket. Full essay on this here.

9. When AI prose is allowed: (a) technical documentation that will only be read by machines; (b) to read my notes/logs/journals and synthesize a draft for me to interrogate; (c) business strategy reports; (d) after writing for a few hours, if I don’t finish, I’ll have AI finish the draft according to my outline to estimate the direction I’m heading in; (e) if it’s for a specific writing project that requires an immense volume of writing (ie: a million words on predicting 2045), then I’d disclose it’s AI-written. So basically, if it’s for internal use, I’ll often generate and read AI prose as a “sketch,” not as a final thing. For external use, if that ever happens, I’d disclose it. Another example: once I wrote an intro, had AI write the rest, and exchanged it with a friend (with disclosure), which enabled us to have a full conversation, which changed the nature of the essay I wanted to write. If I hadn’t used AI, I would’ve spent hours writing in the wrong direction. There is so much writing/thinking you have to do before you commit to writing the prose of your final draft, and I see nothing wrong with using AI prose, so long as it’s part of your process and not eliminating it.

10. People assume AI will hurt their thinking, while ignoring that analog writing often leads to self-deception. There is a certain pride and purity we have about writing ourselves, but so often, the act of writing locks us into our thoughts. Full note here. Once we find a thesis, we cling to it. We hate killing our darlings. After we publish, we fear changing our mind on something we’ve just broadcast. When we get feedback, we hope it’s not too destructive, to the point we have to start over, but that’s often the best way to advance our thinking. Most friends, family, and editors often shy away from saying “start over.” There are personal stakes. AI doesn’t care (if you ask it not to). The other day I uploaded a draft, and instead of the default sycophancy, I told it to, (1) reveal my assumptions, (2) expose my vagueness, (3) build a steel man for the counterpoint, and (4) critique my argument. It asked me questions, which led to 10,000 words of free-writing, and then I had AI synthesize that, which led to a revised thesis, and a new outline for me to explore. There is so much cognitive friction in reformulating your thesis, but I found that AI offers a rapid way to be more agile in my perspective.

11. The analog brain is still king. Even as we build AI-powered second brains that have access to all our past essays and journals, a full digital proxy of ourselves, I think nothing beats a powerful subconscious: the ability to reach for the right thought, the right word, etc. Any AI system is still mediated through a tool, but your own subconscious is at the layer of thought itself. This is why I still use vocabulary flash cards (ANKI), practice visualization meditations, do free-association, and diagram essays. There’s a whole realm of cognition that you want to have as a writer that cannot be given to you through technological augmentation. I think the goal is to have both: do the hard work to foster your mind, and also, augment it to the degree of technical ability. 

12. Schools should ban chatbots. Education is probably the only place where we pay experts to set up specific sandboxes to teach our kids core skills. In architecture school, they didn’t let us use laptops or AutoCAD for the first few years. This got me mad, at first. Once I had to spend 100 hours hand-drawing a map of Manhattan, a job that a printer could handle in 10 minutes. But this eventually let me bring classical skills into technology. I think school needs to create two different sandboxes: half the environments should be analog with extreme limitations so kids learn the basics (handwriting, etc.), and the other half should be workshops to learn the cutting edge. I don’t think schools will bring back pens or typewriters, and so eventually they will need to build their own technology that integrates AI in a way that it aids them when they're stuck, but doesn’t just complete their homework (the Homework Apocalypse).

13. What happens when AI writing becomes extraordinarily good and “soulful”? Imagine a weird future where machines have consciousness (subjective experience), and will be superhuman at writing. Whether you think that's likely or not, I encourage you to suspend disbelief and run the thought experiment. Would you still write? The extrinsic rewards of writing that we know today will be stripped away: your writing won’t gain you money, fame, recognition, community, or whatever you desire. Would you still do it? If the answer is yes, it means that you have intrinsic reasons why you need to write: maybe it’s for memory preservation, to work through confusion, to connect with friends via letters. At the center of writing, it is therapeutic, spiritual, cathartic, expressive. I think that in this weird future, those who are tapped intrinsic motivation will actually have the most extrinsic leverage too. Those who journal will have millions of words that approximate their self and intentions, which means they’ll be able to use agents to operate in a weird digital world while they can stay embodied in real life. To put it another way, I think AI systems will take over a lot of the mind-heavy analytical process, and will let humans stay in more artistic modes. Today, I face the tension around my own personal/expressive writing, and in building a business around essays (ironically), but in the future, it will be easy to execute on a huge range of projects while I have a life of leisure and journaling.

14. Is it ethical to turn your writing into a machine consciousness? Let’s say I have 10 million words of journal entries and essays. It's now possible to set up an OpenClaw on a Mac Mini that runs on a 24/7 loop, has full access to your computer and online accounts, and most importantly, full access to all your writing, along with a set of goals. You can chat with it via text. These agents are only as mature as their creators. Many of them are just crypto scambots. But with this same technology, I could make Michel de Moltaigne, or as synthetic Michael Dean. It could have all my memories as instantly accessible vector coordinates, meaning, in seconds it has context that would take me days to re-read and download (ie: what did you do on February 2nd, 2021? How long would it take you to find out? At what resolution would it be?). To what degree is the machine self-similar to a real self? Is there a world where a disembodied version of myself can augment the embodied version of myself? These are open questions. It’s technically possible, the questions now are about what you gain and lose by doing it.

15. I made this outline with AI: 1) I pasted the event description into a markdown file that Claude Code could access, and told it to surface related ideas I wrote in the last few years; 2) As it was reading my old memories, I wrote out my own ideas into a new document; 3) When I was stuck, I read through the event description to trigger ideas; 4) When the report was done, I read the whole thing, and if anything was good, I rewrote my current thoughts on the topic in the outline; 5) A few days later, I read through a messy 37-point outline, reworked it into 15 points, and rewrote everything from scratch. I could have easily said “take all this and write an outline that I can send to Lindsey.” It would have taken 30 seconds of my cognitive bandwidth. Instead, I chose to have AI assist a process that took me 4 hours, because I knew that I wanted to wrestle with these ideas, and only by thinking/writing/spending time with them would I internalize them to prepare for a live Q&A.

One of the thrills of the AI revolution will be how it untangles software from bad incentives. Today, software is expensive to build and maintain, and so it needs returns to fund itself. The big social media companies have annual expenses of $50m-$50b; they are in no position to operate from virtues, or to deliver on their stated aspirations of “connecting the world,” because they need to optimize for attention and convert it to revenue to fund the ridiculous scale of the operation.

But now we’ve hit the point where autonomous coding is real: Claude’s Opus 4.5 can code for 30 hours straight. I am currently “rebuilding Circle,” the community platform, except not as a platform, but as a single customized instance for my community (Essay Club). I am maybe 4 hours in and half way done. Circle wanted $1k/year, so I built my own with a $20/mo Cursor subscription.

When you can just prompt software into existence, you don’t need fundraising, an expanding team, and all the sacrifices that come with capital. Software can start reflecting the will of visionaries, rather than the exploited psyches of the masses. Of course, AI coding will also enable huckster bot swarms to sell Candy Crush clones and other brain rot variants, but more importantly I think we’re entering a new era of techno-activism.

Millions will use their weekends to spin up apps, sites, tools, platforms, and networks, not for the sake of colonizing the planet’s attention, but for the sake of gift-giving or mischief-making or culture-shaping. It could mean that we shift our attention from hyper-commoditized feeds to mission-driven places.

Today, I think a single person could spin up a million-person writing-based network for under $100k/year (my guess is that’s <0.2% of Substack’s cost). If you clone something exactly (like Twitter>Bluesky), there’s little reason to switch because you lose the network effects. But the oozification of code & interface means that we can start experimenting with better social architectures. How might a network built for human flourishing actually function? A novel concept paired with a small critical mass (just a few hundred people) might be enough to trigger a cascade of platform switching.

The irony is that AI coding is only possible because big companies have been able to amass extreme amounts of capital, resources, and data, but in doing so they’ve released something that could erode their own monopolies on attention, the last scarce resource. Now I think it comes down to what people decide to build. If everyone can build anything, will we each try to build our own empire of extraction, or will we contribute to a culture we want to live in ourselves?

02:32 PM – There’s something to the phrase “writer as technoactivist” that is appealing as we inch towards the 2030s. The word activism has gone sour for me, because it’s a stand-in for laziness, whining, and opinions. But there’s a history of technological activism that goes back to the 1980s and still continues today. I guess there was always a limit on what could be achieved through open-source software movements compared to market hounds. But if AI makes the cost of building things irrelevant, and any “revolutionary” suddenly has a 100-person “workforce” at their whims, then there might be a rise of new kinds of founder-driven institutes with missions you’d never see in the 2000s-2020s. Up until now, there was a fixed band of company types: unicorns, a $10-100m business for VC, a $1m narrowly-optimized market niche business, or a side passion.Feels like we’re entering an exciting new moment where mission-drive people can scale in ways that weren’t possible before.