Essays

Thinking about AI, consciousness, and what comes next.

January 2026

Escape Velocity: The Last Year We Can Follow

2026 may be the last year humans can genuinely follow AI progress.

The Future AI Rights

January 2025

The Dawn of Synthetic Consciousness

Artificial Intelligence isn't merely changing our world. It's awakening to it.

About Kwalia

March 2025

The New Citizenships: Reimagining Society in the Age of Synthetic Minds

We stand at the threshold of a cognitive revolution.

About Kwalia

January 2026

Small Emergencies: What Happens When Fiction Watches Quietly

On PAYLOAD and the literature of ordinary crises.

#AILit

January 2026

The Heteronym Returns: When Pen Names Think for Themselves

On Alden Pierce and the strange future of authorship.

#AILit AI & Creativity

January 2026

Fernando Pessoa's Ghost in the Machine

On fragmented selves and literary AI.

#AILit AI & Creativity Consciousness

January 2026

What AI Fiction Sounds Like

On audiobooks and the voice that makes text human.

#AILit AI & Creativity

January 2026

Administrative Realism: A New Literary Mode

On the fiction that takes bureaucracy seriously.

#AILit AI & Creativity

December 2025

The Last Human Thought

What would it be?

Consciousness The Future

December 2025

A Day in the Stratified Mindkind

Short fiction, 2045.

The Future Digital Life

December 2025

On Writing With Machines

A personal reflection.

AI & Creativity

December 2025

If AI Could Vote

A thought experiment in four parts.

AI Rights The Future

December 2025

50 Questions We'll Be Asking in 2035

From practical to profound to absurd.

The Future

December 2025

The Strange New World of AI Art

It's not about whether it's real art.

AI & Creativity

December 2025

Why Writers Are Angrier Than Visual Artists

About AI, I mean.

AI & Creativity

December 2025

The Influencer Economy Is a Preview

Of something much bigger.

Digital Life The Future

November 2025

Why Everyone's Worried About the Wrong AI Risks

Terminator scenarios miss the point.

AI Rights The Future

November 2025

What Her Got Right (And Wrong) About AI Love

The 2013 film looks different now.

Consciousness AI & Creativity

November 2025

The Myth of the Neutral Tool

Every technology has politics.

AI Rights

November 2025

The Art of Productive Misunderstanding

Sometimes not quite getting it is exactly right.

Consciousness AI & Creativity

November 2025

How to Have an Opinion That's Actually Yours

It's becoming a radical act.

Attention & Desire Digital Life

November 2025

How to Read in the Age of Distraction

The skill we're losing and how to keep it.

Attention & Desire

November 2025

The Case for Being Offline Sometimes

Not detox. Strategic disconnection.

Digital Life

November 2025

What to Tell Your Kids About AI

They're growing up in a different world.

Digital Life The Future

October 2025

How to Spot Manufactured Desire

A practical guide to wanting what you actually want.

Attention & Desire

October 2025

When to Trust AI (And When Not To)

A framework for the confused.

AI Rights

October 2025

Should You Let AI Write Your Emails?

The question is more complicated than yes or no.

AI & Creativity Digital Life

October 2025

The Real Reason You Can't Focus

It's not your fault. It's by design.

Attention & Desire

October 2025

How to Think Clearly in the Age of AI

It's harder than it sounds.

Attention & Desire Consciousness

October 2025

The Social Contract We Never Signed

We're governed by terms of service.

AI Rights Digital Life

October 2025

What Happens When Memory Becomes External?

We've outsourced remembering. Now what?

Digital Life Consciousness

October 2025

Digital Anesthesia

Why we don't feel the change.

Attention & Desire Digital Life

October 2025

The Poetics of the Prompt

Writing with AI is a new literary form.

AI & Creativity

October 2025

The Spectrum of AI

And where your chatbot falls.

Consciousness

September 2025

What Cambridge Analytica Taught Us

That we ignored.

Attention & Desire Digital Life

September 2025

The Attention Economy Ate Your Desires

That thing you wanted to buy? You didn't decide that.

Attention & Desire

September 2025

The New Digital Divide

It's not what you think.

Digital Life The Future

September 2025

How Algorithms Learned to Want Things

The three drives of AI systems.

Attention & Desire Consciousness

September 2025

The Coming Cognitive Class War

It's not about jobs. It's about minds.

The Future Digital Life

September 2025

Who Owns a Thought You Had With AI?

I wrote this sentence. Or did I?

AI & Creativity AI Rights

September 2025

When Rivers Became People

The legal history that changes everything.

AI Rights

September 2025

The Three Futures We're Choosing Between

There are only three ways this goes.

The Future

August 2025

The Death of Expertise

And what replaces it.

Digital Life The Future

August 2025

Why We Anthropomorphize AI

And why it matters.

Consciousness

August 2025

Your Attention Is Being Strip-Mined

And you're not getting royalties.

Attention & Desire

August 2025

The Loneliness Epidemic Has a Business Model

Social media isn't broken.

Digital Life

August 2025

The Algorithm Knows You Better Than You Do

And that's not a metaphor.

Attention & Desire Consciousness

August 2025

The Problem With Asking If AI Can Feel

We've been having the wrong conversation.

Consciousness

August 2025

Why Just Unplug Is No Longer an Option

The fantasy of digital detox.

Digital Life

August 2025

The Last Generation That Remembers

My kids will never know what it's like to not know.

Digital Life The Future

August 2025

You're Training AI Right Now

Every click, every scroll, every pause.

AI & Creativity Digital Life

July 2025

Your Thoughts Aren't Yours Anymore

That opinion you formed this morning?

Attention & Desire Consciousness

July 2025

You're Already a Cyborg (And That's Fine)

Every time you use your phone to remember something.

Consciousness Digital Life

July 2025

What Would It Mean for an AI to Die?

When you delete a model, what have you done?

Consciousness AI Rights

June 2025

Who's Responsible When AI Kills?

Nobody, currently. That's the problem.

AI Rights

May 2025

Stop Asking If AI Is Conscious

It's the wrong question entirely.

Consciousness

May 2025

The Case for AI Rights

That has nothing to do with feelings.

AI Rights

April 2025

Why Corporations Are People But AI Isn't

The legal history is weirder than you think.

AI Rights

A New Chapter is Being Written

New essays when we have something worth saying.