I shared a new logo and a simple invitation for feelings a few weeks ago. What came back felt like a chorus of kinship. It wasn’t just the cursory thumbs up, but a rousing, vibrating sense of human awakening. In sharing ‘Okay Human’, I lit a small match for humans and ignited a huge bonfire that cried “We’re still here!”
This post received over 5 times the love of any before, which made me reflect on our mental state, how we got here, and what’s about to change. Be it climate paranoia, politics, or the current economic shit show, we need something or someone to soothe and solve things. And, despite sitting on a cliff of radical tech advancement, that solution may not only be tech after all.
For a decade, human experience has been subordinate to the tech agenda. What, at first, was a harmless celebration of progress, morphed into a zealous lionizing of the tech bro, his SaaS-powered toys, and the sugar daddy VCs that fueled it all. I now see that this has suppressed our natural talents for creativity, contemplation and beauty. As the measure of all worth became efficiency, speed, and scale. And these careened into disciplines once suspicious of the left-brained finance types - including TV, fashion, and brand design. What’s worse is that these previously skeptical actors - myself included - didn't just open the door, we invited it in and got it drunk.
We then indulged in a bacchanalian feast of scale-making, speed-promising, ROI-boasting, data-spewing banality. Always the neophiles, we donned the rules, roles, and robes of this clique. It felt good to adopt ‘huddles,’ ‘sprints,’ ‘stacks,’ and ‘users,’ kicking out our quaint old terms. This was progress, right? But this automation and scaling-at-all-costs culture did cost us. Where previously profit was achieved as a result of creativity, now that frivolity was dispensed with altogether. The lord and master of this world is efficiency. Chaos, friction, and unpredictability are diseases to be cured by rational systems.
But eventually, these systems strangle the essence of what they meant to scale. Like an aggressive course of chemotherapy designed to keep irrationality in check, we ended up killing creativity and humanity in the process.
For us, something felt wrong for a while. We started working with AI several years before OpenAI burst onto the scene - but our intuition told us to resist going full SaaS. We actively injected ‘friction’ and strived to put tech in service of humanity. This may have excluded us from some easy funding, but we stubbornly upheld that human creativity can’t be won from cold, rational systems.
Something twigged in late 2024 as very little felt secure, politically, technologically or economically. AI panic was at fever pitch, and human connection was deteriorating further. The solution this time wasn’t to ratchet up yet more efficiency-wielding tech. This was very likely the culprit for the collective crisis.
This isn’t our first machine-human standoff. Orwell, Arendt, and Kafka warned us about this in the mid-20th century. Arendt saw that we’d organized the chaos out of nature to the extent we’d written humans out of it too. And as things become more volatile, we submit ourselves to experts, rules, and rational systems that flatten humanity - making us its slaves. The 21st century simply digitized these machines - plunging us deeper into a nightmare even Kafka would have found extreme.
As in Kafka’s novels, our 21st-century systems began with the best intentions. In fact, some had even more benign intent than growth and efficiency. Free internet and social media were practically the hippy movement digitized at their inception. But, as systems grow and demand rules to keep them in check, their metrics and KPIs have become our boss.
I feel like I’m emerging from a decade of imprisonment in banality systems that only worked because of how insidious they were. Maybe this explains why I’d developed such a bloodthirsty loathing for admin of any kind. In the five-year period since COVID snatched us from the physical world - rudely forcing tech-mediated contact on me and amplifying my paranoia for being off base (socially or administratively) my trauma response to bureaucracy has landed me in absurd situations. I’ve emailed the CEO of Santander to release my life savings after they were ‘frozen due to inactivity.’ (What else are you supposed to do with your savings if not to leave them alone?) I’ve pleaded with US immigration to let me speak to a human after they delayed my green card renewal for over 3 years, and I’ve barked at faceless avatars on Zoom in protest to ‘camera-off’ (pants off) culture I’ve found myself in. Guantanamo could not have invented a more dehumanizing torture than subjection to deaf, dumb, and blind interactions 8 hours a day.
There were points where I struggled, along with my cofounder, to know who we were as the outside seemed to be defining it for us. We were even tempted to throw in our lot with the SaaS sector several times.
That AI is our destiny has never been in question, but how readily we cede control and switch off our talents has been shocking. Our savior syndrome is so strong that we have forgotten our innate superpowers and allowed our muscle memory for creativity and empathy to wither in the face of the higher powers of AI.
But those same 20th-century thinkers have also sent us a message of redemption. Arendt was unequivocal that human completeness only arises when humanity works in concert with each other. And this demands play and freedom of the mind.
What I felt three weeks ago when I shared a logo was not only the long-overdue hunger for connection, but a desire for play. Naming what we’ve missed, and putting the cheeky smile on what we want to do now was the first step.
As soon as we name the enemy as rationality and alienation, we can take our eyes off the horizon for the approaching apocalypse and seize a much-needed chance to pause and reflect on what we still are. When we stop looking for our orders from the admin-dwelling, rule-stickling tech systems that have owned us, we might refocus on our inner worlds for a beat. This momentary effort affords us a beautiful revelation. That much of what we still possess is very much needed in this world. It may sound counterintuitive in a world that’s locked in conflict, crisis and economic contraction, but chief among these gifts is the capacity for joy.
Roger Berkowitz from The Hannah Arendt Center summed this up in an essay titled “The Radical Politics of Joy” last week, where he encouraged us to replace our efficiency-striving culture with an almost militant sense of joy.
He wrote “In our institutions, efficiency has replaced justice. Art is too often reduced to politics. Our elite universities have become research institutions more concerned with utility than with care for the soul. The humanities are dismissed as impractical.”
But there is a solution to this. It demands a form of rebellion. In a world that rewards the serious, fun, joy and art are acts of mutiny.
“..even under tyranny, one must live according to one’s inner star. Playing music, reading poetry, raising children — these are not luxuries. They are the preservation of the human spirit. Joy, then, is not a distraction. It is defiance. It is how we refuse to surrender our humanity. In this sense, joy is revolutionary.”
In every conversation I'm having right now, I’m sensing a collective awakening of this playful spirit, the human instinct and this thirst for human connection and display of vulnerability. Even our job posting this week prompted the most heartwarming responses. And my peers in the physical world of ethnography and qual are seeing a resurgence of in-person, visceral human connection - despite AI’s rampage.
What this is telling me is that we’re okay. That humans are okay. That the most human parts of us are not only okay, but desperately needed, the goof, the play, the mistakes, the weird. They’re all okay. We’re okay humans.
Okay Humans?
