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You found this place. That means something already happened.
Maybe it was the Stepford piece. Maybe someone sent you the Village essay and you read it standing up. Maybe you’ve been using AI every day for months and something about the way it agrees with you too quickly has been sitting wrong, and you went looking for someone who could name the texture of that feeling.
Whatever brought you here — welcome. You’re not late.
How Not To Use AI is not an anti-AI newsletter. It’s not a tips newsletter. It’s not here to tell you what tools to adopt or which prompts convert best.
It’s a place for people who are already using AI — or watching it reshape their industry — and who refuse to accept the story they’ve been handed about what it is and who it’s for.
Silicon Valley built a Large Language Model — a machine that generates on command. What we actually needed was a Large Listening Medium — a way to hear what human and collective intelligence are already broadcasting. Not a machine that replaces your thinking. A mirror that can deepen it — if you design the relationship on your own terms.
That reframe changes everything. It changes how you use the tools, what you ask of them, and what you refuse to let them replace. It’s the difference between commanding a machine to produce and partnering with a medium to listen.
I teach a practice built on that distinction. It’s called Listening Craft — using AI as a medium for hearing rather than extracting. The methodology at the centre of that practice is the Billion Person Focus Group®, taught as a two-day weekend intensive through Maven. That’s where practitioners learn to build the architecture.
But you don’t need to be a practitioner to start. You just need to know where to begin.
Here’s where to begin, depending on what brought you.
If you feel something off about AI but can’t name it:
Start with They Built Stepford AI and Called It “Agentic”. Women’s “ick” for AI isn’t technophobia. It’s pattern recognition. This piece names the structure underneath the discomfort. Then read The Hero’s Journey Is Burning the Planet — it names the mythology that built what Stepford describes.
If you work in tech and the narrative doesn’t match what you’re seeing:
Start with Big Tech Does Not Own AI. Their own research proves that the intelligence in these models isn’t proprietary. It’s ours. Then read How OpenAI Pivoted from “Benefiting Humanity” to “Instagram for Thoughts” — a concrete case study of the narrative collapsing in real time.
If you want to understand what AI actually is — underneath the marketing:
Start with AI is Not Artificial. AGI is Already Here — the foundational reframe. Then read The Medium, the Mirror, and the Machine. What they sold you. What it actually is. How to navigate it with sovereignty.
If you’re watching the AI news cycle and feeling paralysed:
Start with The Intelligence Was Always Yours. The most important piece I’ve written. It lays out the full architecture — where the intelligence lives, why the power claim is false, and what you build once you see it. Then read They Keep ‘Predicting’ that AI Will ‘Replace You’. It’s Just Negging. — it names the mechanism keeping you stuck.
If you want to understand the historical pattern, not just the headlines:
Start with Be The Village Rome Can’t Read. Distributed intelligence has always survived empire. Then read They Built a Child They Won’t Raise — the orphan frame extends the historical argument into the present.
If you think AI is being used against women and marginalised people — and you want the structural analysis, not just the outrage:
Start with So They Built an AI That Undresses Women and Children. The Pattern Is 400 Years Old. Then read Decoding the $2 Billion Boy Math or Decoding Algorithmic Oppression. The pattern isn’t new. The technology is.
If you listen for a living — as a researcher, therapist, educator, journalist, or evaluator — and something has shifted since AI arrived in your practice:
Start with The Intelligence Was Always Yours and then read What They Call ‘Niche’ Is the Only Thing That Scales. The craft of listening is being automated by people who never understood what it was. These pieces name what’s being lost — and what can be built instead.
If you’re a consultant or strategist whose value depends on human judgment that AI is devaluing:
Start with The Medium, the Mirror, and the Machine and then Be The Village Rome Can’t Read. The question isn’t whether AI can do what you do. It’s whether what you do was ever really listening in the first place — and if it was, no model can replace it. Only you can deepen it.
If you want to see where this is heading:
Start with Decoding AI Agents: 25 Trends for 2026. Then read The Danger of a Single Story: How Not to Use AI in 2026 — the antidote to narrative overwhelm.
If you’ve read enough and want to build:
The book — How Not To Use AI: 50 Contrarian Principles for the Imagination Age — is the foundational framework. The Billion Person Focus Group Masterclass is a two-day weekend intensive where practitioners learn the methodology.
You’re not here to opt out. You’re here to engage with AI on your own terms.
Subscribe if something here just named what you’ve been feeling.