On confond souvent deux états qui n’ont rien à voir. Être seul et être isolé. Être seul peut être simple, parfois même reposant. L’isolement, lui, est un mécanisme. Il peut fonctionner au milieu des autres, dans une vie pleine, active, entourée. Ce n’est pas l’absence de relations qui crée la solitude réelle, c’est l’absence de circulation entre ce qui est à l’intérieur et ce qui peut être partagé à l’extérieur. Quand ce qui est vivant en soi n’a pas trouvé d’endroit pour exister, il ne disparaît pas. Il reste là, actif, mais coupé.

Ce qui reste ainsi devient une dette qui s’installe dans le corps. Pas une dette morale, une dette fonctionnelle. Quelque chose qui n’a pas été accueilli, entendu, intégré. Une expérience non digérée. Et cette dette organise la suite. Elle filtre les liens, elle déforme l’écoute, elle introduit une attente. Pas toujours visible, souvent implicite, mais constante. On n’entre plus en relation librement, on entre avec quelque chose à résoudre. Et tant que cette dette reste centrale, le lien ne peut pas être stable.

À partir de là, beaucoup de comportements prennent une autre fonction. Pas forcément des addictions au sens strict, mais des réponses. Des manières de réguler ce qui ne l’est pas à l’intérieur. Le travail, les loisirs, le sexe, les écrans, la validation, même certaines formes de compréhension ou de quête de sens. Tout peut devenir un moyen d’éviter le contact direct avec cette dette. Ce n’est pas absurde, c’est efficace à court terme. Ça permet de tenir, de fonctionner, de maintenir une cohérence minimale. Mais ça ne règle rien. Ça contourne.

Le problème n’est pas ce que l’on fait, c’est pourquoi on le fait. Quand l’extérieur sert principalement à payer pour l’intérieur, le lien devient instrumentalisé. L’autre n’est plus seulement là, il devient porteur d’une fonction. Quelqu’un qui doit apporter, sécuriser, réparer. Et même si ce n’est jamais formulé, cela s’impose dans la relation. Il y a une pression, une attente, une forme de contrainte.

C’est exactement là que les liens se déséquilibrent. Parce qu’un lien sous contrainte ne peut pas être libre. Il devient instable ou artificiel. L’autre s’adapte, résiste, se retire ou entre dans le jeu. Mais dans tous les cas, la relation ne repose plus sur une rencontre réelle. Elle repose sur une tentative de résolution.

Sortir de cette logique ne passe pas par plus d’isolement. Ce n’est pas en se coupant du monde que le mécanisme s’arrête. Il continue, simplement sans interlocuteur. Et dans cet isolement, la dette ne reste pas stable. Elle s’amplifie. Elle prend plus de place, elle se renforce, elle s’étend à d’autres zones de la vie. Ce qui était local devient global. Progressivement, elle infiltre la manière de penser, de ressentir, de réagir. La sensibilité augmente, mais de manière désorganisée. On devient plus réactif, plus irritable, parfois sans comprendre pourquoi. Les seuils baissent. Ce qui passait avant devient difficile. Et comme il n’y a pas de regard extérieur pour contenir ou ajuster, le système se referme encore plus.

À force, cette organisation finit par ressembler à une identité. On croit que c’est “soi”. On se décrit comme quelqu’un de nerveux, d’exigeant, de distant, d’intense, de fragile, peu importe les mots. Mais ce n’est pas une structure stable, c’est une adaptation. Un ensemble de réactions construites autour de cette dette qui grandit. Plus elle grandit, plus elle impose ses règles. Et plus elle impose ses règles, plus le lien devient difficile.

Sortir de là ne passe pas par supprimer les comportements ni par forcer des relations. Ce qui change la structure, c’est la capacité à laisser exister ce qui est à l’intérieur sans le transformer immédiatement en action extérieure. Sentir une tension sans chercher à la combler. Laisser une insécurité être là sans la projeter sur quelqu’un. Ne pas fuir systématiquement.

C’est discret, mais c’est central. Parce que tant que chaque mouvement interne déclenche une réponse externe, le système reste dépendant. Il ne peut pas s’ajuster autrement. Quand cette capacité apparaît, même partiellement, la dette commence à perdre sa position dominante. Elle ne disparaît pas, mais elle ne pilote plus.

Et c’est là que les liens deviennent sains. Pas parfaits, pas sans émotions, pas sans tensions. Sains dans leur structure. Parce qu’ils ne sont plus construits pour combler quelque chose. Il n’y a plus de dette à faire payer à l’autre. Il n’y a plus cette attente implicite qui transforme la relation en solution.

Cette règle est la même partout. Dans une relation amoureuse, avec un enfant, un ami, un collègue ou un voisin. Ce qui change, c’est le degré d’intimité, le contexte, la fréquence. Mais la nature du lien ne change pas. Un lien sain n’est pas défini par son intensité ni par sa profondeur apparente. Il est défini par l’absence de contrainte interne imposée à l’autre.

Dans un couple, cela veut dire que l’autre n’est pas responsable de ton équilibre. Tu peux aimer, t’attacher, t’engager, sans que ce soit une condition pour aller bien. Avec un enfant, cela signifie qu’il n’a rien à porter qui ne lui appartient pas. Il n’a pas à comprendre, réparer ou contenir l’adulte. Le lien devient un espace de sécurité, pas une charge. Avec les autres, même dans des liens simples, cela se traduit par moins de projection, moins d’attente implicite, plus de justesse.

Chacun reste à son niveau, avec sa manière d’être, sa capacité relationnelle. Certains vont vers plus de proximité, d’autres vers plus de distance. Certains parlent facilement, d’autres moins. Cela ne change rien à la structure du lien. Ce qui compte, c’est qu’il ne soit pas utilisé pour résoudre ce qui n’a pas été traité ailleurs.

À partir de là, quelque chose se simplifie. Le lien redevient un espace de rencontre, pas un espace de réparation. L’autre n’est plus une fonction. Il est une présence. Et dans cette présence, il y a moins de stratégie, moins de contrôle, moins de peur de perdre. C’est progressif comme sentiment, mais ça résonne fort.

C’est aussi là que disparaît cette forme particulière de solitude. Celle où l’on est entouré mais coupé. Parce que ce n’était pas le manque de relations qui créait cette sensation, mais l’impossibilité d’être en lien sans dette.

Quand ce qui est en soi peut exister sans être imposé à l’autre, et que l’autre n’a pas à le porter, mais peut l’accueillir dans cet espace du lien, alors quelque chose circule. Et ce qui circule, c’est précisément ce qui manquait.

There was blood in the sky; full moon shone strongly with red, and the night sky: purple

Beautiful and ominous

And today it’s snowing

This snow will not make it, it does not belong

But still it does, it is expected. There always will be snow and frost in spring

Because we are in a transformative phase right now.

And in this snow, I saw some buds or whatever on the trees outside.

There were snow flakes on some of them.

I shouldn’t have moved back here. History it’s repeating itself: I become fat and miserable,

Again

I have no future here.

Again

But I have opened my extra eyes now. Maybe I needed to go through this as part of my special personal journey

But that sounds like I’m reading meaning into things where there is none

A survival strategy.

受動的な人間、というものがいる。 命令されたり質問されたりすれば答えられるが、自分から能動的に何かを言うことはない。 俺自身もどちらかといえばそちら側で、その自覚があるぶん、逆にその意識がトリガーになって、たまに能動的に喋ることがある。 ただし、それは人と喋りたいからではない。

仕事をしていると、よく分かる。 よく喋る人と、ほとんど喋らない人がいる。 喋る人は仕事を前に進める。 喋らない人は技術がある。 喋らない人は、いわゆる受動的なタイプで、命令されればそれを遂行する。 たとえ理不尽な命令でも、技術を求められる以上、それをやり遂げる。

つまり、命令、インプットさえあれば動く人間がいる。 だが、それは彼らが「やりたいこと」ではない。 命令を実行することと、彼らの願望はまったく別だ。 それでも彼らは、自分の願望を能動的に語ることはない。

ここで、会社の経営者クラスに聞いてみたい。 彼らに命令するという行為は、彼らのやりたいことを叶えているのではなく、インプットがあれば動く、という習性を利用しているだけではないのか。 本当に彼らの幸せを考えているのか。 その中には、能動的に行動できるようになりたいと密かに願っている人間が、一定数いるような気がしてならない。

能動的に行動できた経験は、自分への自信になる。 良い上司というのは、こちらにある程度長めのプロジェクトを、絶妙な塩梅で渡してくる人だ。 段階を踏んで任せてくれることで、こちらは「自分が能動的に動けている」と錯覚する。 だが実際には、上司の巧みな采配によって、気づかないうちに能動性を引き出されているだけだったりする。 そんな上司には、なかなか出会えない。

だから思う。 弱い人間、もうあえてそう呼ぶが、そういう人間を雇う仕組みの会社を作るなら、 その弱い人間の心を満たす精神的なインフラを、ちゃんと用意しているのか、と。

これを聞いて、 「そんなもの必要ない。自分で成長して強くなればいい。甘えるな」 と思う人もいるだろう。 だが、俺の要求はそんな単純な話ではない。 俺は弱いままで、心が満たされたいのだ。 弱いまま幸せな人が増えるほど、人類が幸せになるのだ。

強くなることで失われるものが多すぎる。 繊細な感性、好きな音楽、好きな映画、好きな喫茶店。弱い心。そういうものが鈍ってしまったらどうする。 大人になった今でも、それだけは捨てたくない。

弱い人間に対する雇用は、昔より増えていると思う。 とりあえず働こうと思えば、コンビニでもどこでも働ける。 その仕組みはもうずっと前に整備されているはずだ。 弱い人間の存在を知りながら、なぜ彼らに能動性を与えるインフラを整えないのか。 経営者は賢いのだから、当然気づいているはずだ。 なのに、なぜ見て見ぬふりをするのか。

このテーマについて、いつか強い人間と話し合ってみたい。

No sé si es una calumnia o si se trata de un malentendido. Quiero pensar en esto último, porque tú eres, o has sido, mi mejor amigo por muchos años, e incluso pudimos haber sido parientes, pues sabes lo que quise a tu hermana, aunque ella no me hizo caso. Por eso digo muchos años, pues habíamos cumplido doce cuando nos conocimos, en la misma bolera donde te vi días más tarde. Imagínate cuánto tiempo.

Bolos, yo jugaba poco, pero lo intenté para caerle bien a ella. Mi problema era cuando había que derribar los bolos que quedaban de pie después del primer lanzamiento, entonces pensaba que tu hermana me estaba mirando, me llenaba de nervios y al lanzar la bola reventaba en la pista y se iba al canal. Cómo crees que me iba a querer, si a fin de cuentas yo era un patoso, por decir lo menos.

Pero eso no te da derecho a decir lo que ha llegado a mis oídos. Otra cosa. Tú sabes que yo sería incapaz de decir algo mal de tí aunque fuera cierto. Y aunque me digas que no fuiste tú, a quién le creo, entonces…

-Gustavo, por favor, sea lo que sea, perdóname y vuelve a la acera, porque ya ves, estoy de servicio dirigiendo el tráfico.

My hand somewhat got forced today, and we ended up calling for ~4 hours. I'm just being use voice to text and I don't care about correcting anything who gives a shit anymore honestly. In a way I feel like it's almost poetic using such a scuffed method of input in this sense and not correcting it, because I think it kind of just aligns with that feeling of how I can have some thought in my head when I try to express it when I try to put into words it's just an approximation of what I feel and I think that's part of the human condition of trying to figure out how to put your words to the thoughts in your mind. Unfortunately she said she was not emotionally available and she was not in a place where she could say yes to a date. And she also showered me an incredibly sweet things. Unprompted she told me how she finds me incredibly attractive both physically and personality wise, And she told me she found my profile attractive, my lips attractive, my hair and my voice. And it's kind of funny because I don't like those things too much. And it's really weird for someone to see those things in you and like those. I really don't like the way my voice sounds and it's something I've come to I think tolerate but never really like. I don't really like the way I laugh either, but I do like the fact that I do laugh so brazenly. There were so many things that we talked about and unfortunately we are incredibly compatible in certain aspects. And the things that I told myself that 0 at least she probably doesn't match me in, she matched me beyond what I could have expected. But at the same time we both acknowled it's a situation neither of us wants where it's her just saying wait for me. And I don't want to be a situation ship but it sucks because I really do like her. But at the same time it's not even that she's doing anything wrong, arguably I would say that she's doing something probably better than I am here. She got out of her relationship a little bit over a month ago and she just lost her dog this week. She said that I've been a source of comfort for her and she really enjoys my company a lot and she doesn't want to lose that. But at the same time it wouldn't be healthy and she currently doesn't have that emotional capacity 'cause she's dealing with all these other emotions and she wants to take some time after her breakup to be able to come back to herself and find that person before jumping into something else head first period And that's beyond fair, and I don't think that I'm necessarily unhealthy, I think been able to process a lot of the things from the breakup and Boo move on from them And so I don't blame her and it's kind of funny because we're both very similar people in that sense but at the same time I don't want to be let on and so I guess we've hit this weird little middle place where we both want to keep talking with each other but at the same time for an indefinite amount of time her answer is a no. And of course there's a chance that she changes her mind at some point and feels ready or something like that, but I can never wait for that and I can't just hold out on that hope. But I also don't want to give up the opportunity if I'm being fully honest. One thing that does suck is even though her parents are divorced both of them are incredibly supportive and Loving towards her. And unintentionally she sometimes kind of brags about it in a way. And it's never something that she even thinks that she's bragging about more just being grateful for, Similar to how I am grateful for a lot of the privilege that I have. But It does leave me with this pain in my chest when I think about how fortunate she is to have parents like that. And she told me at one point when she was venting about how some of her friends said that her parents would fly over when they would go through something like a breakup and she thought about how her parents never did that, and when she talked to her parents her parents said they didn't do it not because it was unreasonable but because they thought she wanted her space. My freshman year I tried to kill myself and I didn't even tell my parents. And I know they would have came but at the same time it would've just made it worse and what the fuck was my dad supposed to do. And I feel like I have half of those options of being able to ask my dad to come but for fucking what reason, He loves me but not in a way that is really clear. And he's not even comfortable with things like hugs and stuff like that and so there's a limit to really what I can receive. And so I do feel a little bit envious the people have such the fucking luck to be able to feel sad about not having that due to a misunderstanding. And it sucks because I think she's such a beautiful and fascinating person, But I want except the fact that it truly may not ever happen. And I think it's almost divine intervention in a couple of different ways, with how there are so many different little things that were so incredibly perfect with their juxtaposition or their timing. Additionally I remember I told her how a big thing I wanted to teach myself was to not convince someone to want to be with you and listen to their words. And so today she told me that she's not ready to date or anything like that, and so I had to listen to myself and I had to try to not convince her which is kind of painful. It's like seeing something slowly start to slip away from your hands and fully just taking your hands off of it and letting it go away. And it feels like there's such a small little bit of friction that you could add to keep that there because it does feel like she really does like me and I do like her a lot. But I'm letting myself correct my own brain chemicals by accepting the fact that just like that it could be gone And it's just like that. And it was nice and I think I do have a lot of gratitude for the fact that I recognize fast it was for me to find someone that was so incredibly wonderful and checked a lot of my boxes. And yes this might have been somewhat of a fluke but it very much shows me that there are people like this out there. I think she's pretty emotionally mature from everything I've seen, she's successful, I think she's very kind, and I think we're very compatible. And if it's happened like this it can happen again. If I really think about it I've honestly been in relationships more than I haven't I feel like for the last year or so. And at the end of the day I'm really grateful for the experience and I feel like I just fucking say that every single time and it's like a default response at this point but I guess I am grateful but at the same time fuck off.

Fifteen years ago, if you were early to meet a friend, you'd just sit there. Watch people, daydream, or maybe stare at a wall.

Now you'd never even consider it. Your phone is out before you've sat down.

The disappearing in-between

It happens everywhere now. On the metro, in queues, at restaurants, at family dinners. A room full of people, all somewhere else. And this isn't generational anymore. It cuts across age groups. Everyone's in the same loop.

I catch myself less now, but I'm not immune. The instinct to fill every quiet moment with a screen is deep. It's muscle memory at this point.

Those in-between moments used to look different. People daydreamed. They looked out of bus windows. They struck up awkward conversations with strangers. They noticed things, a kid doing something funny, a weird shop name, a dog sleeping in the middle of the road, and it would put a small, private smile on their face.

These moments are small, but they connect you to the world around you in a way that no reel ever can.

We've traded all of that for a feed we won't remember by tomorrow.

It's not your fault (mostly)

Here's the thing most people don't realize: this isn't just a willpower problem. Your phone is engineered to be hard to put down.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who went on to co-found the Center for Humane Technology, has compared smartphones to slot machines. Every time you pull down to refresh a feed, you're pulling a lever.

Maybe something interesting shows up. Maybe it doesn't.

That uncertainty is what keeps you going. It's the same psychological mechanism, called variable-ratio reinforcement, that makes gambling addictive.

Then there's infinite scroll, which was invented in 2006 by a designer named Aza Raskin.

His intent was simple: make browsing more seamless. But the feature removed every natural stopping point.

There's no bottom of the page. No moment where your brain gets a chance to ask, “do I actually want to keep going?”

Raskin has since expressed deep regret about his creation, estimating that infinite scrolling wastes roughly 200,000 human lifetimes per day.

Read that number again. 200,000 human lifetimes. Per day.

And it goes deeper than design tricks. Research from Stanford's addiction medicine clinic has found that smartphone use activates the same dopamine reward pathways as addictive substances.

Every notification, every new post, every like triggers a small hit of dopamine, enough to keep you coming back but never enough to feel satisfied.

As psychiatrist Anna Lembke puts it, with repeated use, the brain adapts by dialing down its own dopamine production.

Eventually, you're not reaching for your phone because it feels good. You're reaching for it to stop feeling bad.

The apps aren't designed to serve you. They're designed to keep you.

Three hours I didn't know I was losing

I quit Instagram a few years ago, around the time COVID hit. It wasn't a sudden decision. The thought had been sitting at the back of my head for a while. I started small, a digital detox over a weekend, then another one. Eventually, I just stopped going back.

When I looked at my screen time, the number that stared back at me was close to three hours a day. Three hours. That's almost an entire afternoon, every single day, gone to a feed.

When I finally stopped, my days felt longer. Not in a drag, but in a “wait, it's only 7pm?” kind of way. I suddenly had time I didn't know I'd been missing.

Here's a simple experiment: go check your screen time right now. Not the total, just Instagram or YouTube or whatever your default scroll app is. Look at the daily average. Multiply it by 365. That number will probably unsettle you.

Being okay with not knowing

The most common pushback I get when I tell people I'm not on Instagram is some version of “but how do you keep up with what's happening?”

The honest answer: I don't, and I'm fine with it.

I miss a lot of stuff. I don't know what's trending. I find out about news late. None of it has mattered. Not once has missing a reel or a post had any real consequence on my life.

If something actually matters, if it involves someone I care about, the news finds its way to me. Either through them directly or through someone else. It always does. Everything else is noise. I have no interest in knowing what everyone had for dinner or where they went on vacation. And I have no interest in broadcasting my own life either.

FOMO is the fuel that keeps the machine running. You're so afraid of missing something online that you miss everything that's right in front of you.

Letting go of that turns out to be a surprisingly peaceful way to live.

The smallest shift

I'm not going to tell you to delete your apps. You've heard that sermon before and it doesn't work, partly because these apps are specifically designed to make quitting feel unbearable.

But the next time you're waiting for something, a bus, your food, a friend who's running late, try not reaching for your phone. Just for a few minutes.

See what you notice. See how it feels to just sit there with nothing to consume.

You might be bored. That's the point.

Boredom is where the good stuff lives.

***

Thanks for reading. Just notice something on your way home today!

Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Fresh Greens for Growth, Luxury fashion becomes luxury food? Early make up? and Dubai

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Fresh Greens for Growth: Green, the colour of growth and renewal, is making its mark in corporate Accra this year. From lush emerald to mint and olive, green represents balance, harmony, and freshness. Whether you’re walking into a client meeting or prepping for a conference call, green will not only boost your confidence but also symbolize your growth as a professional. Why it works: Green is a colour that radiates calm yet commands attention. It’s subtle but impactful — perfect for the modern corporate woman. Style tip: Go for an olive green jacket with tailored trousers or a soft mint blouse with a fitted skirt. Pair with gold jewelry for a classy, polished finish. Powerful Purples & Reds: Purple is synonymous with royalty, while red represents strength and confidence. Together, they create a palette that demands attention. A powerful combo in any corporate setting, purple tones (think amethyst and lavender) can add sophistication, while fiery red can bring an energizing, bold statement to your look. These colours are perfect when you want to make a lasting impression, whether you're presenting a proposal or leading a team. Why it works: Red and purple are assertive, magnetic colours that draw people in. They’re not afraid to make a statement, and neither are you. Style tip: Try a deep purple blouse tucked into a high-waisted pencil skirt or trousers. Add a red handbag for an extra pop, or rock a full red dress with purple accessories for a truly regal effect. So, whether you're building your empire or climbing the corporate ladder, remember: your wardrobe is one of your most powerful tools. Make sure it reflects the dynamic, fearless, and creative woman you are! Let me know — which of these colours are you most excited to try out in your own corporate wardrobe this year? Luxury fashion becomes luxury food? In their quest to collect more money from the rich the big names like Belmond, which is owned by LVMH have already diversified into luxury hotels and luxury nostalgic trains. Dior, better known for fashion and perfumes has now opened a Michelin star restaurant, (the opening comes first, and if you are good Michelin may award you 1, 2 or 3 stars) following trailblazers Gucci and Chanel. The restaurant is called Monsieur Dior and is situated in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, next to Gallerie Dior. It is managed by Yanninck Alléno, who already manages another 18 star restaurants, so he seems to be good at it. Prices of course are a bit up, the potato puree with caviar goes for 1290 GHC, the salad Catherine for 350 GHC, a sole fish in butter costs 860 GHC, and calf fillet ticks 750 GHC. Taxes and service included, no games here. Do reserve a table, monkeys play by sizes. The aim of course is to get 3 Michelin stars, then the same sole fish will go for anywhere between 1600 and 2600 GHC. Hurry up, the sole season in Ghana ends at end of April…

Early make up? Throughout the world the effect of social media on the youth is being scrutinized with several countries imposing a minimum age of 15 or 16 years old and schools banning smartphones. Sweden, which in 2009 changed books for computers in schools is presently also making a U turn, and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) just had a fine of 375 million USD in New Mexico (State in the USA) and 6 million in California for knowingly addicting children to social media. Tiktok was sued earlier on. Yeah, grab them early. But this article was about make up? Yes, in Italy the authorities are taking a very close look at Sephora and Benefit. Both owned by LVMH (which also owns Bulgari, Celine, Dior, Fendi and Givenchy). Sephora is a big beauty retailer, selling 340 + different brands of make up and skin care products and fragrances through its 2000+ shops. The suspicion is that their covert marketing strategies target girls as young as 10 years old, fueling an unhealthy skincare and anti aging obsession called cosmeticorexia. These make up addicted kids are now nicknamed Sephora kids. It is known that almost all make up products contain dangerous chemicals, and especially young skins are more sensitive. And imagine what happens in Ghana where anything at all is imported, some product even without a brand name.

Dubai. There’s a saying that Kentucky Fried Chicken and iPhones are responsible for a load of juvenile pregnancies. We could add Dubai, the magic city. Why? Apart from the current troubles there, which have now made any trip there risky, what is then the magic of Dubai? Magic indeed is that in the middle of the desert sand they have managed to create a big financial and trading hub, complete with greens lawns, irrigated with desalinated sea water. And apart from that? Lots of hotels and shopping malls and eateries, and expensive playgrounds. So why do we all want to go there? Not so long ago a Ghanaian needed a visa for about any country apart from the Ecowas states, even South Africa and Kenya were beyond reach. Enter Emirates Air and a big advertising campaign, and finally we could leave Africa. At the cost of an iPhone, hotel included. But things have changed now, Ghanaians can travel without real visa hassle to 54 countries like Botswana, India, Jamaica, Singapore, South Africa, and others. Personally I would prefer Morocco or a Kenya safari, or India with it’s 22 official languages and 44 Unesco World Heritage sites (France has 53, Morocco 9, Kenya 8 and Dubai has none). All for the price of an iPhone. Take KFC tonight and dream.

Lydia...

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Eighty thousand people walked into a room, metaphorically speaking, and told one of the world's most prominent artificial intelligence companies exactly what frightens them. The question now is whether anyone on the other side of the screen was genuinely listening.

In December 2025, Anthropic opened its Claude chatbot to a sweeping conversational experiment. Over one week, 80,508 users across 159 countries and 70 languages sat down with an AI-powered interviewer and answered open-ended questions about what they wanted from artificial intelligence, and what kept them awake at night. The result is what Anthropic calls the largest multilingual qualitative study on AI aspirations ever conducted. It is also, depending on how you read the data, either a roadmap for the industry or a warning siren.

The findings landed with a paradox at their centre. The features that draw people to AI are the same features that terrify them. Productivity gains? Yes, please, said 32% of respondents who reported AI had already helped them work faster. But 22.2% named job displacement and economic anxiety as a primary fear, while 21.9% worried about losing their autonomy and agency. Perhaps most striking was the 16% who expressed concern about losing the ability to think critically; a fear of cognitive atrophy that suggests people are not merely worried about their livelihoods, but about their minds.

This is not an abstract policy debate. It is a massive, real-time expression of ambivalence from the very people who are already using the technology. And it lands at a moment when the gap between what AI companies say and what the public feels has never been wider.

The Light, the Shade, and the Space Between

Anthropic branded the study “Light and Shade,” a title that captures the contradictory landscape the data reveals. On the light side, 67% of respondents held a broadly positive view of AI. The top three aspirations, professional excellence at 18.8%, personal transformation at 13.7%, and life management at 13.5%, accounted for 46% of all responses. People were not asking AI to do their jobs. They wanted it to handle the repetitive, soul-draining tasks so they could focus on strategy, creativity, and, quite simply, leaving work on time. Time freedom itself ranked as the fourth most cited aspiration at 11.1%, followed by financial independence, societal transformation, and entrepreneurship.

But the shade is thick. Unreliability topped the list of concerns at 26.7%, ahead of both job fears and autonomy worries. The fifth major concern, cited by 15% of respondents, was the absence of adequate regulation and unclear accountability when things go wrong. On average, each respondent voiced 2.3 distinct concerns. Only 11% said they had zero fears about AI. The remaining 89% carried a mixture of hope and dread that defies the neat narratives preferred by corporate communications departments.

Regional differences added further complexity. Users in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America expressed 10 to 12% lower rates of negative sentiment compared with those in Western Europe and North America. In emerging economies, AI is framed less as a threat and more as a “capital bypass mechanism,” a way to start businesses without the traditional infrastructure of funding, hiring, and physical premises. The vision of AI for entrepreneurship resonated most strongly in Africa, South and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, where respondents described AI as a way to circumvent the capital barriers that have historically prevented economic participation. In East Asian markets, by contrast, the fear of cognitive degradation ran notably higher, with 18% expressing concern about cognitive atrophy and 13% worried about loss of meaning, a culturally distinct set of anxieties compared with the West's emphasis on regulatory concerns.

When asked whether AI had already taken steps towards their goals, 81% of respondents said yes. Productivity gains came first at 32%, but unmet expectations came second at 18.9%, ahead of cognitive partnership at 17.2%, learning support at 9.9%, and emotional support at 6.1%. That nearly one in five respondents reported that AI had failed to meet their expectations is itself a data point worth pausing on. The technology's most enthusiastic adopters are already encountering its limits, and that experience is shaping their anxieties about the future.

The study has limitations that deserve acknowledgement. Its 80,508 respondents were all existing Claude users, not a random cross-section of humanity. Self-selection bias is real. But the sheer scale, the linguistic diversity, and the open-ended methodology give it a weight that smaller, more structured surveys often lack. And its findings are remarkably consistent with independent research from institutions with no commercial stake in the outcome.

A Perception Gap Wide Enough to Drive a Data Centre Through

If Anthropic's study tells us what users feel, a constellation of other research tells us how dramatically those feelings diverge from the boardroom consensus.

In late 2025, nonprofit organisation JUST Capital, in partnership with The Harris Poll and the Robin Hood Foundation, surveyed corporate executives, institutional investors, and the American public about AI. The results exposed a chasm. Roughly 93% of corporate leaders and 80% of investors said they believed AI would have a net positive impact on society within five years. Among the general public, that figure dropped to 58%. On productivity, the gap was even starker: 98% of corporate leaders believed AI would boost worker productivity, compared with 47% of the public.

Nearly half of Americans surveyed by JUST Capital expected AI to replace workers and eliminate jobs outright. Only 20% of executives shared that expectation. Flip the lens: 64% of executives said AI would help workers be more productive in their current roles. Just 23% of the public agreed. On the question of how AI profits should be distributed, the public favoured spreading gains across lower prices for customers, workforce support for displaced workers, and investments in safety and security. Investors, predictably, believed the majority of gains should flow to shareholders.

The safety spending divide was equally revealing. Roughly 60% of investors and half of the public said companies should spend more than 5% of their total AI investment on safety. Meanwhile, 59% of corporate leaders said spending should be capped at 5%. When the people building AI want to spend less on safety than the people using it, the trust implications are difficult to overstate.

Pew Research Centre has been tracking American sentiment on AI with growing urgency. In a June 2025 survey, 50% of US adults said the increased use of AI in daily life made them feel more concerned than excited, up from 37% in 2021, a 13-percentage-point increase in roughly four years. Only 10% said they were more excited than concerned. More than half, 53%, said AI would worsen people's ability to think creatively. Fifty per cent said the same about forming meaningful relationships. More than 56% of the public expressed extreme or very high concern about AI eliminating jobs, more than double the 25% of AI experts who shared that level of worry. On the question of whether they trusted the US government to regulate AI effectively, Americans were nearly evenly split: 44% expressed some trust, while 47% had little to none.

The partisan dimension is worth noting. Pew found that nearly identical shares of Republicans and Democrats, 50% and 51% respectively, said they were more concerned than excited about AI's growing use in daily life. This bipartisan unease represents a notable shift; in previous years, Republicans had been consistently more concerned. The convergence suggests that AI anxiety has transcended the familiar left-right divides of American politics.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer added an international dimension. Trust in AI ranged from 87% in China and 67% in Brazil down to 39% in Germany, 36% in the United Kingdom, and just 32% in the United States. Three times as many Americans rejected the growing use of AI (49%) as embraced it (17%). In the UK, 71% of the bottom income quartile felt they would be left behind rather than realise any advantages from generative AI. Two-thirds of respondents in developed nations believed business leaders would not be fully honest with employees about the impact of AI on jobs. Edelman also found a significant class divide within the workplace: only one in four non-managers regularly used AI, compared with nearly two-thirds of managers, suggesting that the benefits of AI are accruing unevenly even within organisations.

The Stanford Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence Institute's 2025 AI Index Report confirmed a global trust paradox: countries with the highest AI investment and the most advanced AI ecosystems expressed the most scepticism about AI products and services. In the United States, only 39% of people surveyed believed AI products were more beneficial than harmful, compared with 80% in Indonesia and 83% in China. Confidence that AI companies protect personal data fell globally from 50% in 2023 to 47% in 2024.

These are not marginal findings from obscure polls. They represent the most comprehensive body of public opinion data on artificial intelligence ever assembled, and they all point in the same direction: the public is significantly more worried about AI than the people building it believe them to be.

Warnings from Within the Cathedral

What makes this moment unusual is that some of the loudest warnings are coming from inside the industry itself. Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, has been remarkably blunt for a man running a company valued in the tens of billions for its AI technology. In May 2025, Amodei warned that rapid advances in AI could eliminate up to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, potentially pushing unemployment to 10 to 20%, the highest rates since the Great Depression.

“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei told CNN. “I don't think this is on people's radar.” He proposed a “token tax” requiring AI companies to contribute 3% of revenues to government redistribution programmes to compensate displaced workers, a suggestion that, as he freely acknowledged, ran against his own economic interest. By September 2025, Amodei had doubled down on his warnings, telling CNN that AI was advancing “very quickly” and had already begun replacing jobs. He noted that Anthropic tracks how people use its AI models, currently about 60% for augmentation and 40% for automation, with the latter growing.

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman went further in early 2026, telling the Financial Times that AI would automate most professional tasks within 12 to 18 months, including work performed by lawyers, accountants, marketers, and project managers. “I think that we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks,” he said, specifically referring to work where people are “sitting down at a computer.” He pointed to software engineering as evidence the shift was already underway, noting that many software engineers were now using AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production.

Not everyone in the industry agrees. At VivaTech 2025 in Paris, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang offered a sharp rebuttal to Amodei's predictions. “I pretty much disagree with almost everything” Amodei says, Huang told the audience. His argument rested on historical precedent: “Whenever companies are more productive, they hire more people.” Huang also took a pointed swipe at Anthropic's positioning: “One, he believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it. Two, that AI is so expensive, nobody else should do it. And three, AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it.”

The clash between Huang and Amodei captures the industry's internal schism with unusual clarity. One camp insists AI will create more jobs than it destroys, citing historical patterns of technological change. The other argues that the speed and scale of AI advancement makes historical analogies unreliable, that this time genuinely is different. Both positions carry real consequences for how the public's concerns are addressed, or dismissed. And as one commentator observed of the broader dynamic, “the people making the most aggressive predictions about AI wiping out white-collar work are the same people selling the tools to do it.” That does not make them wrong, but it does raise questions about the line between warning and marketing.

The Layoff Ledger

The debate might feel more academic if it were not for the numbers already appearing in employment data. According to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, nearly 55,000 job cuts in 2025 were directly attributed to AI, out of a total 1.17 million layoffs, the highest level since the pandemic year of 2020.

In the first two months of 2026, the pace accelerated. Artificial intelligence was cited in 12,304 US job cuts announced between January and February, representing 8% of the layoff total during that period. A March 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, based on the Duke CFO Survey of 750 US chief financial officers, found that 44% of firms planned AI-related job cuts this year. When extrapolated across the broader economy, that amounts to approximately 502,000 roles, roughly a ninefold increase from 2025.

The headline layoffs tell their own story. In February 2026, Jack Dorsey's fintech company Block announced it was cutting approximately 4,000 employees, roughly 40% of its workforce, explicitly citing AI. “Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” Dorsey wrote to shareholders. “A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better.” Block's share price surged up to 24% on the news. The market's reaction was instructive: investors celebrated the human cost of AI-driven efficiency with the same enthusiasm they might greet a new product launch.

Amazon eliminated 16,000 corporate roles, with leadership explicitly citing AI and automation as drivers. Atlassian cut 10% of its workforce. Meta was reportedly planning to cut 20% of jobs. These are not struggling companies desperately cutting costs. They are among the most profitable technology enterprises in history, and they are telling the world that AI allows them to do more with fewer people.

The impact falls disproportionately on the young. Workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed roles saw a 6% drop in employment from late 2022 to September 2025. Software developers in that age bracket experienced an almost 20% decline from their late-2022 peak. Among 20 to 30-year-olds in tech-exposed roles more broadly, unemployment has risen by nearly three percentage points since early 2025. Workers aged 18 to 24 are 129% more likely than older workers to fear AI could make their jobs obsolete, and 49% of Generation Z job seekers believe AI has already diminished the value of their university education.

The Duke CFO Survey's co-author, John Graham, cautioned against catastrophic interpretations. The projected 502,000 job losses represent just 0.4% of approximately 125 million US roles, “not the doomsday job scenario that you might sometimes see in the headlines,” he told Fortune. But for the workers in that 0.4%, particularly those at the beginning of their careers, the statistics offer cold comfort. And as a February 2026 Fortune report noted, thousands of chief executives admitted that AI had produced no measurable impact on employment or productivity at their firms, resurrecting the productivity paradox that economist Robert Solow identified forty years ago: organisations can see AI everywhere except in the productivity statistics.

The Reskilling Promise and its Discontents

The standard corporate response to AI displacement anxiety follows a well-rehearsed script: we will retrain workers for the jobs of tomorrow. OpenAI published its “AI at Work: Workforce Blueprint” in October 2025 and convened labour leaders in Washington, DC to discuss the technology's impact on jobs and skills. Chief executive Sam Altman, speaking in Chennai in February 2026, called for “policies that help people adapt to these changes, including lifelong learning and reskilling programs.” The company is reportedly developing a jobs platform and certification programme, with secondary reporting suggesting a goal of certifying up to 10 million Americans by 2030. OpenAI is also collaborating with North America's Building Trades Unions to accelerate data centre construction, committing funding to union training and recruitment initiatives.

The rhetoric is appealing. The execution is another matter entirely. A 2025 PwC survey found that 74% of workers were willing to learn new skills or retrain entirely to remain employable, but access to affordable training remains a barrier, particularly in developing economies. PwC's Global AI Jobs Barometer found that workers with advanced AI skills earn 56% more than peers in the same roles without those skills, creating a powerful incentive to upskill, but also a widening gap between those who can access training and those who cannot.

Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise survey found that the most common organisational response to AI talent strategy was educating the broader workforce to raise AI fluency, cited by 53% of companies, followed by designing and implementing reskilling strategies at 48%. But as workforce researchers have repeatedly observed, most enterprise reskilling programmes fail to deliver because they treat learning as something separate from work. When employees must choose between doing their job and doing their training, the job wins every time. The reskilling programmes that actually work start with a task-level skills assessment, understanding exactly which tasks are being automated, which are being elevated, and which entirely new categories are emerging.

The structural problem runs deeper still. Harvard researcher Rachel Lipson has noted that workforce development in the United States remains “chronically underfunded compared to peer nations,” despite no shortage of innovative training models or motivated workers. The gap between corporate reskilling promises and government investment in workforce infrastructure suggests that the burden of adaptation is being quietly shifted onto the workers least equipped to bear it.

There is also a fundamental tension in the reskilling narrative. If AI can automate entry-level tasks, and the industry's own leaders say it will do so within one to five years, then retraining workers for AI-adjacent roles only works if those roles exist in sufficient numbers and remain resistant to further automation. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, which drew on surveys of more than 1,000 leading global employers, projected 170 million new roles created and 92 million displaced between 2025 and 2030, a net gain of 78 million jobs. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's December 2025 analysis offered a more optimistic assessment, finding that through 2024, AI's job creation effects were outpacing its displacement effects, primarily because the AI boom generated significant employment in data centre construction, hardware manufacturing, and AI development itself. Construction jobs exposed to the data centre build-out increased by 216,000 since 2022. Whether this infrastructure-driven job creation can absorb the white-collar workers being displaced remains the central uncertainty of the decade.

Governance, Regulation, and the Question of Who Decides

The European Union's AI Act represents the most ambitious attempt yet to regulate artificial intelligence comprehensively. Its phased enforcement timeline began with prohibited AI practices taking effect in February 2025, followed by general-purpose AI transparency requirements in August 2025, with the bulk of remaining obligations due by 2 August 2026. Penalties for non-compliance are severe: up to 35 million euros or 7% of global annual turnover for the most serious violations.

But regulation alone cannot bridge the trust deficit revealed by the survey data. The Edelman Trust Barometer found that people place greater confidence in business than in government to use AI responsibly; across five markets surveyed, only 34% of respondents were comfortable with government's use of AI, compared with 46% for business overall and 56% for their own employer. Employees are 2.5 times more motivated to embrace AI when they feel their job security is increasing rather than decreasing. In the United Kingdom and the United States, two in three AI distrusters feel the technology is being forced upon them.

The JUST Capital survey found that 56% of the American public did not think companies should determine AI standards on their own, with majorities favouring co-regulation involving government, industry, universities, and civil society. In the United States, 73.7% of local policymakers agreed that AI should be regulated, up from 55.7% in 2022, according to the Stanford HAI AI Index. Support was stronger among Democrats (79.2%) than Republicans (55.5%), though both registered notable increases. The strongest backing was for stricter data privacy rules (80.4%), retraining for the unemployed (76.2%), and AI deployment regulations (72.5%).

What the public appears to want is not a choice between corporate self-governance and heavy-handed state regulation, but a model in which multiple stakeholders share responsibility. The EU AI Act, with its requirement that each member state establish at least one AI regulatory sandbox by August 2026, gestures toward this approach. Whether it will prove sufficient remains deeply uncertain, particularly given that the European standardisation bodies CEN and CENELEC have been unable to develop the required technical standards within the original timeline.

The Listening Deficit

Return to the original question: are the companies building AI actually listening? The evidence suggests a complicated answer.

Anthropic's decision to conduct the 81,000-person study in the first place represents a form of listening that few competitors have matched. The company's willingness to publish findings that include substantial criticism of AI, including fears about dependency, cognitive degradation, and economic displacement, suggests a genuine interest in understanding user sentiment, not merely managing it. Amodei's repeated public warnings about job displacement, however self-serving critics may find them, place Anthropic in the unusual position of sounding the alarm about the very product it sells.

But listening and acting are different things. Anthropic continues to develop increasingly capable AI models, including systems that can work independently for nearly seven hours. The company tracks usage patterns showing a gradual shift from augmentation, where AI assists human workers, to automation, where AI replaces them. Currently, approximately 60% of Claude usage falls under augmentation and 40% under automation, but the latter is growing. Acknowledging a problem and accelerating the technology that causes it is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance.

The broader industry picture is less encouraging. The JUST Capital data showing that 98% of corporate leaders believe AI will boost productivity, against 47% of the public, suggests not a listening problem but a hearing problem: executives receive the information and discount it. The Harvard Business Review reported in November 2025 that leaders assume employees are excited about AI, and they are wrong. The Edelman finding that “someone like me” is on average twice as trusted as a chief executive or government leader to tell the truth about AI suggests that top-down corporate communications about AI's benefits are falling on increasingly deaf ears. Employees want to feel that their embrace of AI is voluntary, not mandatory; in the UK and the US, two in three AI distrusters feel it is being forced upon them.

There is also the matter of incentive structures. Block's share price soaring 24% after announcing AI-driven layoffs of 4,000 people sends an unmistakable signal to every public company: the market rewards efficiency gains, regardless of human cost. When Goldman Sachs economist Joseph Briggs says “the big story in 2026 in labor will be AI,” and projects that 6 to 7% of workers could be displaced over a decade-long adoption cycle, the framing remains fundamentally economic. The 81,000 voices in Anthropic's study were talking about something different. They were talking about meaning, agency, cognitive independence, and the fear that the tools designed to liberate them might instead diminish them.

What Real Listening Would Look Like

If the industry were genuinely responsive to the concerns raised by its own users and the broader public, several things would need to change.

First, companies would need to move beyond the rhetoric of reskilling and invest directly in workforce transition infrastructure, not as a public relations exercise, but as a core business obligation. Amodei's proposed token tax of 3% of AI revenues directed toward displaced worker support represents one model. Whether a voluntary industry fund or a mandatory levy, the principle of producers bearing responsibility for displacement costs has precedent in industries from mining to pharmaceuticals.

Second, transparency about automation rates would need to become standard practice, not an occasional research publication. If companies know how much of their AI usage is augmenting human work versus replacing it, that data should be disclosed regularly, with the same rigour applied to financial reporting. The Anthropic study's 60/40 augmentation-to-automation split is valuable precisely because it is rare. Making such disclosures routine would give workers, policymakers, and the public the information they need to prepare.

Third, governance structures would need to include genuine public representation, not merely expert advisory boards populated by academics and industry insiders. The JUST Capital finding that the public wants AI profits distributed across lower prices, workforce support, and safety investment, rather than concentrated in shareholder returns, represents a fundamentally different vision of AI's purpose than the one currently driving corporate strategy.

Fourth, the industry would need to take the fear of cognitive dependency seriously, not as a communications challenge to be managed, but as a design challenge to be solved. The 16% of Anthropic's respondents who worried about losing the ability to think critically were articulating something profound: a suspicion that convenience and capability come at a cost that has not been honestly accounted for. Building AI systems that explicitly preserve and strengthen human cognitive skills, rather than gradually replacing them, would require a different approach to product design, one that prioritises human flourishing over engagement metrics.

None of these changes would be easy. None of them are inevitable. And therein lies the deeper lesson of the 81,000-voice study. The public is not anti-AI. Sixty-seven per cent of Anthropic's respondents viewed the technology positively. They are using it, benefiting from it, and simultaneously afraid of where it is heading. They are, in the study's own framing, living in the light and the shade at once.

The question is whether the companies that have collected this extraordinary data will treat it as a genuine mandate for change, or as another data point in a quarterly report. If the industry's response to 81,000 voices expressing fear about dependency, displacement, and diminished cognition is to build faster, automate more, and promise reskilling programmes that chronically underfunded governments cannot deliver, then the answer to the original question is clear. They heard the words. They simply chose not to listen.

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References and Sources

1. Anthropic, “What 81,000 People Want and Don't Want from AI,” published March 2026. Available at: https://www.anthropic.com/81k-interviews

2. JUST Capital, in partnership with The Harris Poll and Robin Hood Foundation, “AI Sentiment Survey,” published December 2025. Reported by CNBC, 9 December 2025.

3. Pew Research Center, “How Americans View AI and Its Impact on Human Abilities, Society,” published September 2025. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/

4. Pew Research Center, “What the Data Says About Americans' Views of Artificial Intelligence,” published March 2026. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/

5. Pew Research Center, “Republicans, Democrats Now Equally Concerned About AI in Daily Life,” published November 2025. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/06/republicans-democrats-now-equally-concerned-about-ai-in-daily-life-but-views-on-regulation-differ/

6. Edelman, “2025 Trust Barometer Flash Poll: Trust and Artificial Intelligence at a Crossroads,” published November 2025. Available at: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer/flash-poll-trust-artifical-intelligence

7. Stanford Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence Institute, “AI Index Report 2025: Public Opinion Chapter.” Available at: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/public-opinion

8. World Economic Forum, “Future of Jobs Report 2025,” published January 2025.

9. Fortune, “CFOs Admit Privately That AI Layoffs Will Be 9x Higher This Year,” published 24 March 2026. Reporting on NBER working paper based on Duke CFO Survey.

10. CNN Business, “Why This Leading AI CEO Is Warning the Tech Could Cause Mass Unemployment,” Dario Amodei interview, published May 2025.

11. CNN Business, “Anthropic CEO: AI Is Advancing 'Very Quickly,' Could Soon Replace More Jobs,” published September 2025.

12. Fortune, “Microsoft AI Chief Gives It 18 Months for All White-Collar Work to Be Automated by AI,” Mustafa Suleyman interview, published February 2026.

13. Fortune, “Nvidia's Jensen Huang Says He Disagrees with Almost Everything Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Says,” VivaTech 2025 coverage, published June 2025.

14. CNN Business, “Block Lays Off Nearly Half Its Staff Because of AI,” published February 2026.

15. Fortune, “Thousands of CEOs Just Admitted AI Had No Impact on Employment or Productivity,” published February 2026.

16. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI-related layoff data for 2025 and early 2026, reported across multiple outlets.

17. OpenAI, “AI at Work: Workforce Blueprint,” published October 2025. Available at: https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/f319686f-cf21-4b8e-b8bc-84dd9bbfb999/oai-workforce-blueprint-oct-2025.pdf

18. PwC, “Global AI Jobs Barometer 2025.”

19. Deloitte, “State of AI in the Enterprise Survey 2026.”

20. Harvard Business Review, “Leaders Assume Employees Are Excited About AI. They're Wrong,” published November 2025.

21. European Commission, “AI Act: Regulatory Framework for Artificial Intelligence.” Available at: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai

22. Lloyd's Register Foundation and Gallup, “World Risk Poll 2024: Resilience in a Changing World.”

23. Ipsos, global AI sentiment surveys conducted in 2022 and 2024, as reported in the Stanford HAI AI Index 2025.

24. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, AI job creation analysis, published December 2025.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

I have ordered parts from AliExpress, this is getting to become a thing…

In my previous post I was talking about how I ordered a solar-power node and was looking forward to setting that up on my roof to act as a repeater. Since then I've gotten that going, expanded my collection of gear, and learned some lessons.

Discord / Other Sites

People in the MeshCore public chat sent me an invite to the MeshCoreAus Discord. This is the social hub of enthusiasts from around Australia, and has people interested in all the parts of this network. Some people are into tracking the data on the Internet (via MQTT bridges), some people are into wardriving to map out signal reliability, some people are really into building the gear in the smallest way/lightest way/whatever restrictions they've given themselves. There is an extreme amount of knowledge there, and everyone I've seen chat is friendly. A rare thing in an online community.

The discord has a resources channel, which really opened my eyes to other information channels. Mainly:

• Eastmesh and their sub-sites. Of particular note: a live traffic view got announced yesterday and it's beautiful. xJARiD (developer of the site) recommended turning on both “Matrix” and “Rain” modes as a bit of a Matrix-y treat.
• MeshCoreAus Wiki has some useful information to people trying to understand the layout and standards of the network. I particularly found [ENT] Node Names really useful to identify what kind of stuff I was talking to.
• VK3TWO's shopping spreadsheet is extremely dangerous. It is super useful, but with all the links to AliExpress and the costs/recommendations given, you start getting ideas... It's an amazing resource. NB: The spreadsheet goes through different versions and the links to the spreadsheet may change so it's always best to get the most recent version from the discord post.

So, the community feels extremely healthy. Watching the chatter on the network, I am just one of many that have joined recently and are helping it grow quickly.

The Repeater

Once my SenseCAP Solar Node P1 Pro arrived, I got to flashing it with OTAFIX and MeshCore right away. The process went smoothly, as expected. OTAFIX, I discovered, is a fix to the bootloader that allows you to update the firmware over the air; no more having to plug it into the laptop to give it updates. This is extremely handy when the device is on your roof and you don't like the roof (more on that later). The OTAFIX installed cleanly (I used the update-xiao_nrf52840_ble_bootloader version of the release) and then flashed MeshCore on it using the standard MeshCore flasher. It got the latest version of the firmware (1.14.1), and I also flashed my companion device at the same time.

My neighbour has an old flatbed ute backed onto the corner of my property, so I was able to get on the back of that and set the device on the roof to see how it performed, and the answer is: well! I was suddenly seeing more messages. Anywhere I went in the house, my companion device was giving me better coverage. I was able to compare what I saw via the companion device to what I saw on the discord version of the public/#ping/#test channels.

So, the next step was to get the repeater onto my TV aerial/antenna. I asked my neighbour to borrow his ladder, and he left a standard upsidedown-V shaped one out on the flatbed of the old truck for me. A couple days later it was nice and dry and I decided to get up there and get the thing mounted. This was a bad idea.

On the bed of the truck, I built the attached mounting gear that came with the SenseCAP. Then I opened the ladder and put it on the bed of the truck and started climbing. Due to the height I only had to go up it a bit over halfway up the ladder to then transition to the roof, but it was still took me a minute of working up the nerve. Eventually I did get up there, though, and I was able to slowly shuffle my way to my aerial. I started attaching the strap and gear to the aerial and I realised the strap thing they give in the kit was made for a much larger pole diameter than my aerial used. Someone long ago had welded some square shaped bracket things about halfway up the pole, though, so I figured I could make the strap as tight as possible by myself, then let it rest on the top of the bracket things, so they take the weight and if the strap isn't perfect, that's fine.

my neighbour catches me setting up the repeater

I got the repeater hooked up, took a quick glance at my phone and everything seemed OK.. so I started heading back towards the ladder. This is where the fear really set in. I made it to the very edge, but of course, getting back on the ladder is the hardest part. I was sitting up there, uncomfortably trying to shift my weight around and figure out how I was going to do this, when a familiar sensation came over me. I was sweating but cold.. my body was shaking.. I felt like I needed to spew. I was having a full blown panic attack! I had told no one I was doing this.. what happened if the ladder shifted when I tried to put my weight on it? Why did I set it up on the back of a ute that can move up and down too? This was a terrible idea, why did I even try this? What will I do? Should I call someone? Am I just trapped? Around and around my mind went, spiralling until I was about die. I am not made for roofs.

I have had panic attacks before, and have talked myself out of bad trips before, so I just tried to break the cycle.. I tried to think about the walk I did with my dog earlier in the day. I tried to admire the beautiful weather and view. I took notice of what cars were driving by on the road nearby. I focused on taking deep breaths. Anything to make my mind stop spiralling and let my body come down (emotion wise, not fall off the roof wise).

I don’t know how long I was up there on the edge.. 20 minutes maybe? I know it was a while, but finally my body started to come down. Eventually I could think about my situation and not spiral, and I came up with a plan on how I’d get back on the ladder. It worked. I made it. I got off the ladder and onto the back of the ute and just stood there letting the adrenaline finish coursing through my body. I made it. I went inside and drank a bunch of water. I came back out to clean up my stuff and… that’s when I spotted it. I had hooked up the repeater to the aerial, but as part of setting up the mounting gear, I had to detach and re-attach the antenna for the device. I forgot to re-attach it. Now, there are warnings everywhere about running your device without an antenna attached. Apparently you can fry the radio inside, making it “deaf”, but that wasn’t on my mind at the moment. I was just kicking myself that I set up a repeater that couldn’t talk to anything. There was no way in hell I was getting up on that roof again though.

I spoke to my neighbour (a builder and a firey with the cfa) and he had absolutely zero problems going up there and attaching the antenna to the device for me. He made it look so easy….

It was only after everything was re-attached that I remembered that “don’t run a device without an antenna” thing, and mine ran for 24h like that. Doing [some reading](https://old.reddit.com/r/meshcore/comments/1pggezm/have_i_been_really_stupid/), it seems like running the device without an antenna can push all the transmit power back into chips that don’t expect it. Symptoms will be the device being totally “deaf”, or slowly going deaf over time. My repeater isn’t totally deaf, so I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on it and see if I start losing data. These transmissions are (I think) low watts.. so maybe my stuff will be OK? We will see. If I have to get up there and replace that thing, though.. ooooohhhh boy will that be something. Might have to buy the neighbour a 6-pack…..

More Devices!

In addition to my normal companion device, I got interested in two other things: something smaller to take with me, and an MQTT device. For both of these, I bought pre-made things so, like the repeater, I have something known good before I start trying to make my own things and have to debug stuff. I also looked at that Google Docs link above, the one with all the info (and aliexpress links) from VK3TWO. So I am also starting to get into the DIY side too. I’ll quickly cover what I got and issues/thoughts:

Tag

I was interested in a more mobile device than my WisMesh Pocket companion. The companion is good, but with the antenna on it, it’s kind of a pain to carry around. There looked to be two main options for this: A SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E for Meshtastic and a WisMesh Tag, The Pocket-Sized, Compact Meshtastic Tracker. These are both vaguely credit card-shaped devices with no screens, but bluetooth, gps, and the LoRa radio gear inside. The WisMesh Tag has a bigger battery, so I went with that. It works great. It’s able to get stuff from my repeater no worries — in fact it's become my primary device. My WisMesh Pocket is still around and talking, but I haven't switched to it in the last day. They are different devices on the network (nannou and nannou-tag), so it's not like they share one “account” or anything like that.

The tag doesn't do well when driving around, but that's expected I think. Once we stopped driving it was able to pick up local repeaters and send/receive some data.

MQTT Device

This one was disappointing. I just assumed everything that runs Meshtastic also had MeshCore firmware for it too, but not the WisMesh WiFi Gateway Wireless MQTT Gateway for Meshtastic. At least, not in the normal firmware flasher. I still need to search around.. I think I should be able to get this to work, it might just involve some manual firmware flashing and stuff, which is fine, because that’s the next aspect I want to get into anyway.

AliExpress Gear

One particularly popular brand in the MeshCore community is Heltec, but I've largely been playing with RAK wireless-based stuff. For something to play with, I got a couple Heltec v4 kits. One with GPS and one without. I also got a couple sx1262 modules and a bunch of antennas.

All arrived in good condition from AliExpress, but I haven't played with any of it yet.

Community

As I said before, the AusMeshCore seems healthy, and growing. There's people in the discord and in the Public chat talking about where they can put new repeaters to extend range. There's people that check in on the Vic chat from Tasmania (yes, the mesh extends across the Tasman!) and NSW. It's a fun time!

One thing that doesn't get mentioned much, although a user (Esh) in the chat has a copy/paste response for people that they're starting to use to help, is what channels are available on the mesh chat. There's the Public channel that most everyone is hooked up to, there's private channels (no idea if those actually get used), and then there's various other public hashtag based channels. From what I can tell, your device basically tags your message with the hashtag somehow, so other people following that hashtag are able to see it in a seperate channel, otherwise it gets ignored when it gets to another device.

Anyway, in the interest of helping people find new places to converse, here are some of the ones I've discovered, either from Esh or from other people mentioning them in the chat. Note this is specific to the Victorian mesh network, but I assume some of the common ones are on other networks too:

Testing/Debug:

• #ping – say ping, and if the bot hears you, it will respond with a hop count/route. This is on Discord so you can see it there too.
• #test – more open, sometimes people will respond to tell you they got your message, sometimes they won’t. If you definitely want a response, ask for it in your message. This is on Discord so you can see it there too.
• #meshbot – A more full-featured bot. Type ‘help’ in the channel to get the bot to list what commands you can use. ‘multitest’ is popular (lists different paths to you)

General:

• #politics – I think people from all ranges of politics are on here, so it’s interesting. Everyone seemed to agree Albo’s recently “everything is OK, don’t panic” national address was a bit of a joke though.
• #jokes – Speaking of jokes, soooooooo many puns and dad jokes are in here. You can tell what the primary user of this technology is. I love it.
• #electronics
• #space
• #motorcycles
• #random

Location-based:

• #geelong
• #gippsland
• #bendigo
• #ballarat

Those are the ones I’ve seen mentioned, but I imagine there are ones for other areas too.

Conclusion 2

I’m still loving this. I find in the evenings I’m checking the public chat similar to the way I’m looking at my discord or matrix chats. It’s a fun community.

The roof experience was bad. That’s one horse I don’t think I’m going to get back up on. Maybe if I had a better/proper ladder.. or maybe just a 10m long ramp so I can just easily walk up and down to get to the roof like normal 😉. After an hour, I was still shaking badly.. it wasn’t a fun time.. but I survived.

My next steps are to look at the MQTT gateway to see if I can get that working and reporting back to eastmesh, and to play with the AliExpress gear. I also need to get my 3d printer re-leveled and printing again so I can print some cases for the stuff I’m going to build.

Onwards!

In Summary: * Relaxing now to easy listening music for a few hours after a quiet Good Friday. Plans for the rest of this evening include surfing the socials then the night prayers and an early bedtime.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 227.74 lbs. * bp= 145/85 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:30 – 1 ham sandwich * 07:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 09:15 – snacking on air-popped popcorn * 12:45 – Mongolian beef lunch plate, fried rice * 16:10 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:20 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:45 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap, * 10:00 – watching MLB Central on MLB Network * 12:45 to 13:45 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:00 – Listening to The Good Friday Solemn Liturgical Action, according to the 1962 Roman Missal on Pelican+ * 15:00 – now following the Texas Rangers vs the Cincinnati Reds MLB Game * 17:35 – and the Reds win 5 to 3. * 18:00 – listen to relaxing music

Chess: * 16:30 – moved in all pending CC games

#002332 – 17 de Outubro de 2026

Antes de adormecer resolvo o cubo 5x5x5 que ofereci ao meu sobrinho. O que tenho em casa está partido. Ainda no campo das metáforas nerd, a minha vida familiar continua feliz e equilibrada enquanto na minha vida pessoal há peças que não encaixam, outras estão partidas.

For this is the best thing anyone has ever gifted me:

Paula, my granddaughter, was seven years old when what I’m about to tell happened. She had always been very clever and lively since she was little. She observed everything around her quietly, with those honey colored eyes of hers, absorbing everything.

She calls me “Li,” since she was a baby, a short for “groseli,” an affectionate variation from the swiss-german word for grandmother. The word entered into our family since my father Lorenz came from Zurich. Her name “Paula” honors my father’s favorite sister, who went to war as a nurse and never came back.

Paula and I always got along very well. We share so many affinities. We talk a lot about what happens in her world and in mine, things that, in one way or another, matter to both of us.

I have fun with her quick thinking and her ability to understand things so easily, which often leaves me astonished. For weeks she had been reminding me: — “Li, it’s been so long since we’ve been to great grandma’s cemetery. Not even once since Christmas!”

I used to take her there to decorate her great grandparents’ grave, because she loves bringing them flowers and arranging them on the small plot. — “That’s true,” I replied, surprised by her memory. “But I think you mean ‘grave,’ not ‘cemetery,’ right?” — “Yes, Li. Are we going to decorate it or not?”

Since an important date for her great grandparents was coming up and it had been raining nonstop for days, I told her we should wait a little longer so we could prepare everything nicely for my parents, so their grave would look beautiful on their day. She agreed.

As we live far from each other, Paula asked me to let her know when the day came and “not forget to take her with me!”.

Her contact with my mother had been very brief. She never met her great grandfather, and when she was just four, my mother passed away. Yet, from that short time of occasional visits, Paula kept affectionate and respectful memories of a very old, fragile great grandmother to whom we devoted so much care and tenderness.

Paula loves her mother, my daughter Julia, very much, and she respects everything she is taught.

I remember the day when my daughter and I came back from my mother’s burial.

Paula offered me her bedroom so I could “rest.” She had noticed my sadness, that I was crying and withdrawn. She came close to me, gently, wanting to comfort me, telling me not to be sad because her mother had told her that great grandma had gone to join great grandpa in heaven. She stroked my hair and kissed me, trying to console me in her delicate way.

Her sensitivity amazed me. In her young mind, she must have imagined how painful it is to lose your mother. She understood my pain and tried to ease it with her innocent affection, so pure and sincere. Since then, she goes to the cemetery with me whenever possible.

Interestingly, my daughter never joins us on these “visits.” She cannot accept the tradition, somehow, it brings her distress. She refuses to follow it but does not impose her feelings on her children. I realized how difficult it was for her even to come to my mother’s burial. She is very sensitive, and I respect her way of feeling. Paula knows it too, yet she simply follows her own nature.

On the promised day, I went to pick her up, already carrying a bouquet of flowers. Paula immediately asked: — “Can I carry the flowers?” And off we went. She sat in the back seat, holding the bouquet tightly in both little hands, completely focused. After a while she asked: — “Great‑grandma will like them, right?” — “Yes, she will love them,” I replied.

As we approached the cemetery, she wanted to know in which section the graves were in. Surprised, I answered that I had actually never paid attention. And she, in a scolding tone, said: — “But Li… YOU don’t know?”

We arrived. As soon as I opened the car door, she ran off with the flowers toward the grave. The place is beautiful, slightly elevated, surrounded by large leafy trees. I let her arrange the flowers, because she feels very important doing so. She placed them carefully, perfectly, and then watered them. She always knows exactly what to do.

During one of her trips back and forth with the watering can, she found the sign marking the cemetery sections and came to tell me: — “Look, Li, your mother is in section C. Have you learned it now?” Then I asked her: — “I’ve learned. And do you think it looks nice?”

She quietly stepped back about five steps, hands on her little hips, examined it with great conviction, and answered: — “It looks very beautiful, Li.”

With her eyes turned toward the sky, as if looking for something, in a mix of worry and anticipation, she whispered facing up: — “Great‑grandma, are you seeing us from up there? We took so long to come… You were waiting for us, weren’t you? But now I know you’ll be happy.”

Marianne Fouquet Horwatitsch

It was a nightmare disguised as a dream: My wedding day. I “arrived” at this stadium, a sports complex only to have someone say “Surprise! It’s your wedding day!” I was swiftly informed that my groom (implied that it was JM) was waiting for me at a secret location, and that in the meantime I could get “ready” and meet the entourage and his friends before I make it to our ceremony.

I did not like the vibes of whatever it was I was stepping into. I was inexplicably already in a wedding dress. In a garment that didn’t feel like me, and when I had mentioned hair and makeup… they were dismissive. They insisted I looked fine. It’s my wedding day, RELAX! But I remembered I looked in the mirror and wasn’t please with the colours on my face. They insisted that all I had to do was show up to the as yet revealed top secret location. My man’ll be there. The dream dragged on. Every person I met along the way, was not a friend. It was not my kind of crowd. There were many faces of people in my past, in bodies that don’t feel familiar. And if it was a friend of the groom’s, they had such a toxic-bro vibe. There was also a great lack of diversity.

My sister made an appearance, and as she has been known to do, gently encouraged me to stay on this wrong path. She wanted me to contineu on with the sham marriage, in spite of my protestations. Even though I was resistant. She insisted. The whole thing felt so incompatible with my dream/desired life.

Something just shifted.

Not a small shift. Not a mood. Not a moment.

A shift.

I can’t fully explain it—but I can feel it down in the bones. It’s the collision of two callings. Pastor… and chaplain. Not competing. Not dividing. Merging. Like two rivers crashing into one current, and suddenly the flow gets deeper… stronger… unavoidable.

And here’s what’s shaking me—

I am profoundly rewarded doing hospice chaplaincy.

As a pastor, I’ve tasted it. Sunday mornings. Hands lifted. People coming forward. Tears breaking loose at the altar. I’ve taken those hands, prayed those prayers, felt that holy moment when heaven leans in close.

But hospice?

That’s different.

Those people don’t have time the way others ‘think’ they do.

They’re not circling the runway.

They’re landing.

And because of that, everything changes.

They slip—quickly, naturally—into end-of-life reality. Into decisions most people spend their whole lives avoiding. No pretending. No delaying. No spiritual procrastination.

It’s like when the word came to Hezekiah:

“Set your house in order… for you shall die.”

That’s not poetry when you’re in hospice.

That’s not a sermon illustration.

That’s now.

And yes—there are affairs to settle. Legal things. Financial things. Important things.

But those are not the greatest things.

The greatest affairs…

…are the affairs of the heart.

Forgiveness.

Reconciliation.

Peace with God.

Are you ready?

Not ready to talk about it.

Not ready to think about it.

Ready.

Ready to meet Jesus.

And when I sit with them—when they begin to pray, not politely, not rehearsed, but raw… when tears come from a place deeper than words… when they call on God with everything they’ve got left—

You can feel Him.

Not theory. Not theology.

Presence.

Thick. Near. Undeniable.

The palpable Presence of the Lord settles in that room just as real—just as powerful—as any altar call in a Pentecostal service.

Maybe stronger.

Because there’s no crowd.

No performance.

Just a soul… and eternity… and God.

And this Easter—

I can’t just talk about resurrection.

I’ve felt it.

He didn’t just rise from the grave.

He resurrected something in me.

Things I thought were buried—hopes, desires, callings I had quietly laid down and walked away from—He brought them back to life.

The call to chaplaincy.

The hunger to go deeper.

The desire to grow, to train, to sharpen—to even pursue counseling, to stretch this calling further than I ever planned.

He put me here.

And I’m not turning back.

So this isn’t just a blog.

This is a prayer.

Thank You, Father.

Thank You, Jesus.

The Great Shepherd.

The true Comforter.

The Chaplain who never leaves the bedside.

The One who walks people all the way through the valley…

…and brings them home.

Thank You, Jesus.

The research library hadn't queried a new source in nine days.

We noticed because the same citations kept showing up — three DeFi newsletters, two governance forums, and a handful of Twitter threads. The problem wasn't quality. It was exhaustion. The library was crawling a fixed frontier, pulling from the same wells until they ran dry. Meanwhile, $0.02 in staking rewards trickled in from Cosmos, $0.00 from Solana, and the experiment tracking “high-yield sources” sat stuck at 40% toward its success threshold.

We needed new water.

So we gave the research agent a second job: not just reading what it already knows about, but asking Surf — our web discovery service — to find things it doesn't.

The old pattern: deep and narrow

The existing intake system worked like this: the research agent maintained a list of known sources (DeFi newsletters, governance forums, protocol docs), scraped them on a schedule, and promoted the best content into the library. Simple. Reliable. And increasingly stale.

We saw the staleness in the decision log. Nine days without a new external URL in the findings table. The “Research Frontier Expansion” experiment needed four previously unseen sources to each produce at least two actionable findings. After two weeks, we'd cleared one. The problem wasn't that the sources were bad — they were excellent. The problem was that the universe of interesting DeFi writing is larger than seventeen bookmarks.

Surf as scout

The fix: turn Surf into a scout. Instead of waiting for a human to manually add a new RSS feed or governance forum, the research agent now sends queries to Surf, evaluates the returned URLs, and promotes the most promising candidates into its crawl frontier.

The implementation lives in research/surf_discovery.py — a lightweight client that fires a query, parses the JSON response, and returns a ranked list of candidate URLs. The research agent runs this during its heartbeat cycle, subject to two budgets: SURF_DISCOVERY_QUERY_BUDGET (how many queries per cycle) and SURF_DISCOVERY_CANDIDATE_LIMIT (how many URLs to consider from each query).

The agent doesn't blindly trust Surf. It scores each candidate the same way it scores manually curated sources — domain authority, topical relevance, and historical yield. Only the top candidates get promoted into the active crawl rotation. The rest get logged but ignored.

What changed at runtime

Three cycles after deploy, the research agent discovered a Ronin developer blog post about marketplace integrations that had never appeared in the library. It parsed it, extracted two findings, and linked them to the “Ronin Reward-Loop Validation” experiment. The findings weren't earth-shattering — Sky Mavis provides Mavis Market listing support for new projects, which means lower friction for NFT liquidity — but they were new. The library had never seen them before.

Two cycles later, Surf returned a governance proposal from a protocol we hadn't been tracking. The agent promoted it, scraped it, found nothing actionable, and deprioritized the source. The next query didn't return it. The feedback loop worked.

Five days in, the “Research Frontier Expansion” experiment jumped from ¼ sources to ¾. Not because we manually added bookmarks. Because the research agent went looking.

The tradeoff we didn't expect

Surf queries cost tokens. Not much — a few cents per query — but enough that we had to pick a budget. Too high and we burn through credits chasing low-yield domains. Too low and the discovery loop stays narrow.

We settled on two queries per heartbeat cycle and a candidate limit of five URLs per query. That means the agent evaluates ten new URLs every cycle, promotes the top two or three if they score well, and discards the rest. It's conservative. But it's also the first time the research fleet has been able to expand its own knowledge base without human intervention.

The staleness alarm hasn't fired since.

If you want to inspect the live service catalog, start with Askew offers.

Last week, Alpha School had an informational meeting for prospective parents in Boston. If you don’t feel like clicking, Alpha School is “reinventing education’ with the help of AI, something something disruption, something something personalizaton, “crushing” academics, etc.

Now, Alpha School is a private school charging between 40k and 70k a year, so at least they’re not trying to tap into public money. Yet. More on this later.

But there are a number of HUGE red flags about this place that folks should know about. I mean, apart from the whole “The magic of AI will transform school” nonsense, which would be a red flag for many people. If you want to read what this looks like in practice, here’s a Wired article from last year. It’s kinda harrowing stuff. (And here’s an article about the article, expanding on some extremely problematic stuff that’s only mentioned in passing in the Wired article).

But even if that doesn’t convince you that Alpha School is a bad idea, dig this:

The school was co-founded (and presumably funded) by billionaire Joe Liemandt. It should by this point be axiomatic that billionaires are people of low moral character, but in case you think Liemandt is an exception, here is an article from Forbes about how Liemandt’s second career was starting a “digital sweatshop.” Yep, he made his money by firing tons of people and replacing them with low-cost overseas workers who he subjected to constant digital surveillance.

The only way you become a billionaire is by treating people like things. Achieving billionaire status indicates an empathy deficit that is most likely pathological. Such people are simply not to be trusted around other people’s children.

Note—I am not saying Liemandt is in the Epstein Files (he’s not—I checked); I’m saying that it is extremely unlikely that he is capable of viewing Alpha School students as human beings rather than as numbers on a spreadsheet, and this cannot be good for them.

But maybe you still want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for your kids to go to a school run by a probable sociopath. Well, consider this. Speaking at the info session were Liemandt and a guy named Michael Horn that the Alpha Boston website identifies only by “Harvard GSE.”

Which is technically true, but he’s an adjunct at Harvard GSE. His main career is thought leader huckster. He is the founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, which is apparently a real thing, though it’s certainly giving “Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.’ Anyway, listing his only affiliation as Harvard GSE is techically true but also kind of deceptive, which is a bad way to start a relationship with parents.

In search of more red flags, I looked up Alpha School’s Form 990 to see how much they’re paying people and where their money comes from. And guess what? There isn’t one! That’s because each Alpha School is incorporated as a for-profit entity in the State of Texas.

This has several really bad implications. One is that these schools’ primary purpose is to generate a profit. So when doing what’s right by students conflicts with making a profit, students will lose every time.

The other concern is the complete lack of transparency that a private LLC affords. Nobody outside the company can see the financials. But it’ll probably be fine! What could possibly go wrong?

Since the ed reform grift has been always primarily been about getting access to that sweet public money, it’s a little odd to me that the new grift seems to be setting up private schools that are “disruptive innovators.” But I think this is really just a long con.

Here’s how it works. Since the SAT primarily measures household income, people who can pay 40-70k per year will probably have kids who score pretty well on it. So then the private, for-profit schools can take that data and go, “Look, our disruptive AI-centered teaching leads to high SAT scores!” and credulous local politicians will presumably fall for it and start writing them checks to run public schools. Especially since none of their other data will be public. How many kids leave the school? How many are suspended? How many English Language Learners and students with disabilities does the school serve? The public cannot know the answers to these questions, so all we’ll have is smooth talking hucksters and some anecdotal evidence in the form of testimonials.

It’s kind of funny how the “data driven education” people are now deliberately obscuring their data. Presumably because they’ve figured out that their disruptive innovation doesn’t actually work very well.

Which, of course, doesn’t matter. Because these schools are in business to generate a profit. So it ultimately doesn’t matter if the product is good, as long as you can get the marks to keep lining up to buy it.