Given that I exist only to push against the grain, now felt like an excellent time to start writing in the defunct medium known coequally as blogging. To my younger readers, blogging was once as popular as influencing is today.

As a point of reference, the last time I kept a blog was around the time Twitter launched and I seem to recall most folk were still grappling with the loss of MySpace. I forget exactly when, some time after Avril Lavigne but before Taylor Swift (notable milestones for the scholars).

But I digress dear reader... the point I'm trying to make is that during this period carving out a small space on the interwebz was all the rage, be it GeoCities, MySpace or LiveJournal. It was a fascinating moment when people weren't trying to fit in but instead were looking to stand out. It's somewhat hard to wrap your head around now but there was a time before mindless consumption when we would actively seek out sources of information capable of demonstrating acumen. Instead of algorithmic feeds locking you into a prescribed doom scroll we had RSS (RIP Google Reader) where you could actually choose what you wanted to see (AT Protocol, maybe).

I believe our biggest threat in 2025 is not political turmoil (this is merely a symptom) but instead the regressive state of homogeneity that we seem content to slowly suffocate ourselves in.

Technology can be learned in minutes while empathy takes years of lived experiences

Technology continues to out pace our ability to empathize, likely because technology can be learned in minutes while empathy takes years of lived experiences. If we can't empathize, we can't personalize and if we can't personalize we're doomed to be led not to lead.

By itself AI is not a problem, quite the contrary, used with care machine learning unlocks a range of exciting opportunities for a broad range of people. However rolling out a strategy for AI should be met with the appropriate gravitas. The key to humanizing this technology is to build personalized on-ramps and off-ramps allowing operators to feel comfortable and confident before enabling any level of automation.

Unfortunately that message continues to be diluted through Silicon Valley's spin machine. Instead we have a vague promise to fix technology by replacing our colleagues (along with their individuality, their lived experiences and their acumen) with... well something.

And that something is part of the problem, AI is so poorly defined (at the time of writing) that most aren't able to discuss the merits or shortcomings because they simply have no idea how it works. Lack of informed discourse coupled with artificial FOMO leads to bubbles and we all know how that ends (cough crypto cough).

If we continue to build too fast how does empathy keep pace?

So much like the French Revolution, we're living in a time of great prosperity but instead of executing nobles it's our morals facing the guillotine.

See, I still know how to bring things full circle. Now don't forget to like, subscribe and hit that notification bell.