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introduction | welcome to staying human

welcome to Staying Human — where you’ll join 156 others looking for a dynamic, creative, materially useful kaleidoscope into the ways technology is shaping who we are. There are unexpected connections across art, history, music, politics, philosophy and physics — and tracing those contours lends perspective. Atomic Habits meets English major; common sense meets unforgiving prediction.

concepts in play | where we’ll focus

dehumanizing trends reflect varying levels of investment, scale and subtlety, taking shape in ominous variety. here’s a first look into what we’ll cover:

• the costs of algorithmic design

• deepfakes and the erosion of truth

• the mid-avalanche news media’s AI microwave

• simulation-driven desexualization

• the invisible slope of addiction and pharma-driven dependence

• emptiness and the psychological decline of hope in America

• the GPT-offshoring of young minds and warping of U.S. education

• the state of modern dialogue and debate in election season

some conversation-starters for sure. but everyone knows someone struggling with at least one of these, if not several. too many technological discussions fail to properly analyze—let alone predict—how everyday people will respond to widely adopted technologies, how various hardware and software grows more personal, and where we should begin to set guardrails before our default settings are changed from within.

style | layers, patterns, common sense

individual sections (e.g., quotes from literature, ideas from chess, etc.) within each newsletter edition will offer new ways of viewing an overarching conceptual theme that we’re wrestling with individually and societally (as in the list above). the final puzzle should say more than its pieces.

each concept will call for different mediums (e.g., deepfakes may have a range of multimedia / social content, while literature will largely entail the written word, etc.), and so each edition’s structure will be custom-fit along topical lines. we’ll also be designing graphics to accompany many of these concepts and better visualize the right ideas.

contribute | we want your ideas

the topic list is wide-open, but the Staying Human project would be pretty mechanistic if we didn’t take input from real people. we want to hear your ideas for pieces, collaboration opportunities, and meaningful events that flew under the radar but deserve attention.

good conversations offer the possibility of good communities; good communities can make a surprising amount happen. throughout each post, there will be multiple avenues to offer your rating and hear your ideas.

guiding principles | final thoughts

everyone wants to be “more efficient”, “super-productive”, and the like. But speed isn’t always the name of the game. Depth, thought, and interlocking sources of meaning will power Staying Human — even if that means “less traction” or whatever. Here are the tenets of this project:

1. originality > ease — in an era plagued by artificiality, real writing still matters. You won’t find AI-generated content here.

2. quality over cadence — there are 12,000 guides about “posting every week” — but for us, if there isn’t great material to be written in a given window, it won’t be forced. Only the good stuff.

3. honesty over false-ted-talk-optimism — if there isn’t a realistic solution to a problem, there won’t be handwaving and false optimism the way so many 12-minute presentations conclude. Objectivity still has a place.

there aren’t definitive plans to make anything paid. much like Atomic Habits and other high-quality newsletters, all the essentials will remain free. if you’d like to send in support of any kind for the effort needed to put this together, drop me a line at [email protected]. It’s always welcome and greatly appreciated.

bonus | sneak preview

here’s a quick snippet from Baldwin on reckoning with reality as a necessary condition for change — a pillar of this publication, and the kind of thing you’ll find in the fiction section of the Staying Human library:

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