There’s a Hum Under Everything Right Now
Why so many of us feel uneasy, and what that unease is really about
It’s not panic. Not exactly.
It’s quieter than that. More persistent.
You feel it when headlines scroll past a little too fast. When a system answers a question before you finish asking it. When “efficiency” starts sounding less like progress and more like pressure.
Late at night, when the noise finally drops, the question sharpens:
What if the future is being built in a way that doesn’t need me?
Most conversations about AI rush to the surface questions about jobs, tools, productivity, and advantage. Those matter. But they don’t explain the feeling because the anxiety most of us are carrying isn’t really about technology.
It’s about worth.
It’s about whether being faster, smarter, and more optimized is quietly becoming the measure of whether a life matters at all.
Why this place exists
I’m starting this Substack because I don’t think this moment deserves hot takes or easy optimism. And it doesn’t need panic either.
It needs careful attention.
This will be a place to slow things down and name what’s actually happening beneath the speed, questions of authority, meaning, human agency, and value in a world increasingly shaped by non-human systems.
I’m not trying to predict the future.
I’m trying to tell the truth about the present.
I’m writing under my own name because I believe words about meaning and authority should be owned, not outsourced. I’ll be responsible for what I say here.
Where this begins
This stack starts with something I’ve been working on for a while: a short manifesto called DREAD: Anxiety About AI Is the Fear That You Don’t Matter Anymore.
It doesn’t argue that AI is evil.
It doesn’t reject technology.
It doesn’t offer a list of solutions.
It tries to put language to the unease many of us feel but haven’t said out loud, and to follow that unease all the way down to the question underneath it.
DREAD is the starting point, not the destination. It’s the pressure point where the larger conversation becomes unavoidable.
I’ll be releasing it here shortly.
An invitation
If this resonates, if you’ve felt the hum, the tightening, the sense that something important is being decided without us, then this is where I’ll be thinking and writing through it, carefully and in public.
You’re welcome to stay.
More soon.