Stoic Tech

This is what grief actually looks like. Not an algorithm. Not a chatbot. Not a subscription service. This. And that distinction matters more than the tech industry would like you to think. I've been sitting with this one for a while. That's not something I usually say. Most of what I write about, I feel clear on. Scams make me angry. Privacy violations make me frustrated. Bad tech policy makes me want to write to my MP. The emotion is usually straightforward. This one is diff

This is the right energy. Not intimidated. Not impressed. Just thinking carefully, which, it turns out, is the most powerful thing you can do with AI. Let me be honest with you before this post even gets going. Every week I get emails, comments, and messages from people in this community asking some version of the same question: "Michael, should I be using AI? Is it as amazing as everyone keeps saying?" And every week I give the same answer. It depends entirely on who's doing

Decades of failure, refinement, and devotion; all held in one hand. No algorithm has ever known what this feels like. That's the whole argument. Last week, one of the most powerful AI companies in the world made an announcement that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, released their newest version and claimed it had developed something called taste . Not intelligence. Not speed. Not accuracy. Taste. The ability to loo

Someone has to say it out loud. Might as well be us. I want to talk about something that almost nobody is talking about honestly. Not because the information isn't out there. Because saying it clearly, to people who need to hear it, feels inconvenient for the people with the most to gain from your confusion. So let's fix that. Not the breathless headlines about AI changing everything. Not the doom-and-gloom predictions about robots taking over. Not the corporate press release

Marcus Aurelius never owned a smartphone. He never scrolled through a Facebook feed at midnight or watched strangers argue in the comments of a YouTube video. And yet, nearly 2,000 years ago, he wrote the exact wisdom you need to navigate the digital world with your peace of mind fully intact. Welcome to Stoic Tech. Who Was Marcus Aurelius — And Why Does He Matter Now? Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD; arguably the most powerful person on earth at the ti