Shit be crazy
I feel like I’m waking up to a fresh nightmare every morning. Amidst a loneliness epidemic, the whole world order is getting shaken up like an ant farm in a malevolent child’s hands. Blink and it’s a new bleakness. The barrage of system-level crises across government, market, and climate can really erode your own sense of personal agency. I see people being discounted and discarded while technology gets deified. I think we’ve lost the plot. We’ve got ethnofascist tech bros decrying our very humanity, pushing a narrative of AI superiority. No one wants to be reduced to a meat puppet for software, but we’re adopting these rich losers’ vision as inevitable - trading in our pandemic sweatpants for dependence on their AI products. Along with the erosion of our basic social skills, we’ve forgotten our creative potential to solve problems and realize new realities on our own terms.
Why I’m still hopeful
After two decades of qualitative market research practice – focus groups, online communities, one-on-one deep dives, “shop-alongs”, UX interviews, ethnographic visits, and backroom observation across global markets – the thing that continues to surprise and inspire me is just how much we’re all the same. We’re all social, emotional, curious, and imaginative beings, fundamentally aligned in the things we need and desire. We respond similarly to specific cues and conditions. Whether in the calm of everyday, mundane moments or under embattled extremes, we’re constantly sniffing out meaning and striving for purpose. Even in the face of authoritarian violence and a fractured information environment, people are standing up for people.
Far from diminishing our species-level sameness, all the beautiful peculiarities emerging from different cultures, demographics, perspectives, habits, and habitats give us a fuller understanding of how to be human. Variety enriches, expand, and evolve our collective story. Our twists of human expression are endlessly fascinating in their individual nuance, but mixing them offers a potent chemistry. When we come together our capacity is infinite!
Our shared project
Welcome to the “How to be Human” project!
This space is intended to be a resource and a discourse for the alienated. For those of us contending with feelings of isolation, struggling to initiate and maintain relationships, we’ll lay out practical guidance on how to increase your relational intelligence. For anyone anxious about being displaced by AI, we’ll unearth the uniquely human traits you can leverage as future-proof advantage. If you seek a better sense of belonging, you belong here.
I am not anti-AI and this platform is not a Luddite’s asylum. I believe technology is great when it serves us (just not when it’s the other way around). However, there’s already a chorus of AI boosters belting out positive use cases and tips for integration. Here, we’ll only be using AI to clarify what makes us distinctly human… and as the occasional punching bag.
Our context in this exploration of humanness is one-on-one, in-person interaction and our focus will be on these three C’s:
Connection
Conversation
Collaboration
Along with my own POV informed by years of fieldwork, this ‘Stack will feature piping hot, primary research on these topics as well. I’ll be interviewing subject matter experts and everyday humans who have built their success on relational skills and human understanding – from CEOs to community organizers, from anthropologists to AI engineers, from rabbis to strippers.
I want you to be a collaborator here as well, fellow human. I’m hoping these posts will spark thinking, surface tensions, and, ultimately, bring us all closer together.
Down with algorithmic pigeonholing and predictive flattening!
Screw seamlessness and endless optimization!
AGI can kiss our fleshy collective ASS!
Let’s get back out into the world and talk to each other.
Let’s celebrate our messy, squishy nature, move forward fearlessly into friction, and reassert the value of empathy.
Let’s reclaim the future for humanity!
