New Here? → Please Start Here.
AI is a medium, not a maker. There is no mastering of AI. There is only mastering yourself.
You found this place. That means something already happened.
Maybe it was the Stepford AI piece. Maybe someone sent you one of my Village essays and you read it standing up. Maybe you’re interested in the #HowNotToUseAI Challenge. 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. 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.
How Not To Use AI is a new way of making decisions using AI without outsourcing human judgment. It’s a place for people who are already using AI, or are watching it reshape their industry. It’s people who refuse to accept the story they’ve been handed about what it is and who it’s for.
Silicon Valley thinks they built a Large Language Model—a machine that generates on command. It’s actually 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 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.
The Ecosystem: The Sovereign Path
You don’t need to be a technologist to take your sovereignty back from the machine. You just need to know where the doors are. Read the essays to deprogram the narrative, read the book to learn the principles, join the challenge / trainings to practice a new way of listening:
The Mirror → Find your AI Archetype: Take the #HowNotToUseAI Diagnostic Quiz. AI isn’t a tool you simply pick up and put down. It’s a medium you live inside or travel through. A tool does what you tell it; but a medium reflects you back—your habits, your blind spots, and the grain of who you already are, whether you meant to hand any of that over or not. We’re past asking if the medium is changing you. The question is where. So think of this diagnostic quiz as a mirror. It breaks down 16 distinct AI usage patterns, grouped into eight pairs showing the exact difference between using AI out of fear, and using it from a place of sovereignty or power. There are no ‘bad’ results. The places where you feel stuck are really just your natural strengths pointed in the wrong direction. Find out exactly where the system has its hooks in you—and how to take your mind back. Knowledge is Power.
The Map → Read the Book. My bestselling book How Not To Use AI: 50 Contrarian Principles for the Imagination Age is the foundation. It isn’t a manual for typing better prompts—it is the complete philosophical argument for moving from a captive of the machine to a sovereign of the medium. Fifty principles to protect your imagination and ensure you are working with the technology on your own terms. (Available in ebook, paperback, hardback, and audiobook).
The Practice → Take the 30-Day Challenge: If the book is the map, the #HowNotToUseAI Challenge is the underground network. Over five weeks, we turn the fifty principles into a lived, daily protocol alongside a cohort of fellow readers. Grounded in the philosophy of grounded in the philosophy laid out in chapter one of my book — Don’t Start With Silicon. Start With Soul, this is where you build the boundaries to protect your work, your voice, and your time. You don’t need to read the book first to join—you just need to be ready to step off the grid. (For paid subscribers on Substack).
The Guild → Master the Methodology: For creators and founders ready to build something professionally, I pioneered and teach a methodology called The Billion Person Focus Group®. Instead of treating AI as a vending machine for generating soulless content, you will learn to use it as a highly tuned instrument for listening to your market’s collective unconscious. You will learn to build a bespoke “Listening OS.” You won’t just learn the philosophy—you will leave with the exact workflows, pre-built AI agents, custom Claude skills, and prompt libraries required to map your market’s latent needs. You can master the architecture in my intensive cohort on Maven and later join our guild of practitioners, strategists and builders.
The Fortress → Fortify your Organisation: If your team’s primary value depends on the exact human judgment that AI is actively trying to average out, you don’t need a software implementation plan. You need an AI sovereignty strategy. We don’t just train your teams on tools; I help you redesign your organization’s relationship with collective intelligence to ensure your human talent commands the machine, never the other way around. Find out more here.
The Archive
If you want to understand the philosophy before you step into the practice, here is the foundation. These are not quick takes; they are deep, structural dismantlings of the Silicon Valley “broligarch” narrative. Find the exact friction that brought you here, and begin.
I. The Myth vs. The Reality
If you want to understand what AI actually is underneath the marketing: start with AI is Not Artificial. AGI is Already Here. Then read The Medium, the Mirror, and the Machine and The Medium Is Not Just the Message. It’s Your Only Move.
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. Follow it with How OpenAI Pivoted from “Benefiting Humanity” to “Instagram for Thoughts” and Attention Is All You Need — Silicon Valley named the mechanism correctly and still got what it means wrong.
If you feel something is “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. Then read The Hero’s Journey Is Burning the Planet and The OpenClaw Sensation: They could have built anything. They built the wifey.
If you’re watching the AI news cycle and feeling paralyzed: start with The Intelligence Was Always Yours. 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. and The AGI Builders at Davos Quoted This Movie. For the labour angle, read They Say AI Is the Next Industrial Revolution. Gen Z Already Knows How Those End. and They Got Automation Backwards.
II. Power, Marginalization & Empire
If you want the historical pattern, not just the headlines: start with Be The Village Rome Can’t Read. Distributed intelligence has always survived empire. Then read Decoding the Empires of AI and Vatican Washing: Why Every Tech Broligarch’s Road Now Lead to Rome.
If you think AI is being used against women and marginalized people — and want the structural analysis: 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, Algorithmic Suppression: Why Platforms Need You More Than You Need Them, Reese Witherspoon Was Right About Women and AI, and Writing Was Never a Test of Who Could Think.
For matriarchal and radical ecofeminist takes on building AI: start with They Built a Child They Won’t Raise. Then read Where is the Mother? – Part 1 and Nobody Mothered the AI – Part 2.
III. For the Makers, Humanists & Strategists
If you’re an artist, writer, or maker worried about your imagination or cognitive atrophy: start with Your Imagination Was Always Empire’s Last Frontier. Then read They Didn’t Steal Your Art. They Stole the Story About What Art Is. and Why I Call Myself a Griot or Don’t Start With Silicon. Start With Soul.
If you listen to customers / clients for a living — researchers, therapists, educators, journalists, evaluators: start with What They Call “Niche” Is the Only Thing That Scales. Then read They Built a System to See Everything. But It Can’t See You.
IV. Companionship & the Machine
If you’re tempted to treat AI like a companion or a friend: start with Yes, You Should Anthropomorphize Your AI. Just Not Into a Companion. Then read The ChatGPT-5 Revolt: They Tried to Build Skynet But They Got Eywa — what happened when millions revolted rather than lose that companion.
Subscribe to
You’re not here to opt out. You’re not here to blindly adopt it.
You’re here to engage with AI on your own terms.
Subscribe if something here just named what you’ve been feeling.
"AI is a medium, not a maker" is a thought-provoking distinction. The part that resonates most is the reminder that the quality of what emerges still depends on the quality of the human engaging with it. The technology may accelerate the process, but judgment, curiosity, and meaning remain deeply human responsibilities.