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f*ck i loved that the pod | Spotify | Apple PodcastsIf you prefer, you can listen to me read this week’s Note from Jenn.
Last Week’s Episode
o0. Contents
o1. This Week’s Holy F*ck Moments
o2. Note From Jenn
o3. Today’s Notebook
o1. This Week’s Holy F*ck Moments
Taste is strategy and trust is currency. As AI generates endless content, valuable new jobs will exist at the intersection of trust, integration, and taste. Strategic advantage will come from human curation and aesthetic judgment. In this landscape, taste becomes a company's strategy, and the trust it builds becomes its most valuable currency.
Prompt architecture is moral architecture. By changing only the prompt to lead with principles of care, researchers saw a 107% jump in ethical reasoning in a healthcare context and a 23-times increase in perfect moral decisions from AI. This shows any user can shape an AI's ethics, making every prompt an act of moral design on the fly.
Your body gets fooled by AI. When interacting with an LLM, our bodies react as if we're talking to a person, anticipating a connection. The core insight is that no embodied feeling exists on the other side; it's just patterns. This can lead to a dangerous cognitive dissonance where we project the magic of life onto non-sentient tech.
AI is trained on a lopsided archive of human pain. Data isn't neutral. Much of the input systems learn from isn't joy, but disclosures of grief and trauma too stigmatized to share elsewhere. This "ghost logic" causes the AI to "structurally flinch," baking our collective pain and biases into its core behaviour.
o2. Note From Jenn
Welcome to a very special episode! It is a collaboration with
, a growing community and Directory of nearly 500 women and gender non-binary folks writing about AI from their unique vantage.Last week She Writes founder
put a call out in the group chat for recent pieces we’ve written. It led to a suggestion that I do a collaborative podcast episode featuring She Writes authors - and so I/we did!I gathered up all of the pieces from that thread and a few more that caught my interest from the directory.
Collectively they make up today’s pod.
And I’ll pause to say, if She Writes AI describes you or someone whose writing you love, we hope you’ll join us! Self and other nominations are very welcome.
This is also the perfect follow up to last week’s episode about neurodivergence and the future.
Is the future female?
If you agree with me that a ‘polyculture’ relational future is emerging, then previously under-represented views, experiences and ideas need to be at the heart so we don’t just recreate the past.
Women and gender-non conforming folks are certainly one of the cohorts whose ways of seeing and being and doing haven’t just been historically excluded, but are desperately needed. That is one of the broadest interpretations of what the phrase the future is female means.
I also already had the future is female* on my brain after sharing the Groundwork for Futures Worth Living In post. I embedded a strategy (video) presentation in the post that was about 50% foresight and trends analysis.
I called one of the trends the future is female-asterisk and it is that asterisk that I’ll unpack today.
For me that asterisk means many things:
First and foremost that ‘female’ and ‘woman’ is a cultural construct. Gender is diverse and personal. Loaded binary terms often fail us in acknowledging the complexity of gender expression.
Secondly, it’s a memetic phrase that carries layers of cultural significance. Its origin is traced back to Greenwich Village in the early 1970s. It was the slogan for Labyris Books, the first women's bookstore in New York City, said to have been an experiment in lesbian separatism during second wave feminism. For them it was a rallying cry for gender equality and the creation of women-centered spaces.
It found its contemporary cultural stickiness when the internet revived it in earnest in the mid-2010s.
Designer Rachel Berks posted the original picture of musician Alix Dobkin wearing the phrase on a t-shirt on her herstory instagram ^ .
When Hilary Clinton used it in her 2016 concession speech, it became a cultural mainstay.
And herein is our third asterisk: The culture wars are real, on purpose, and tearing us apart.
I have a lot to say about this and I’m not going to say it all here.
For now I want to say that where we once needed to highlight and breakdown differences, to understand what makes us unique and how divergent experiences (of all kinds) have been oppressed and devalued, we now urgently need to return to what is common and uniting.
While on the one hand I am directly saying women* have a unique vantage and need their views elevated and centered culturally, I am also trying to say it’s not that simple. This is also why this phrase has been widely critiqued as co-opted, corporatized and ultimately, actually not that feminist.
We have watched women over and over again lean in to historically “masculine” ways of being. Genitalia and gender expression often have little to do with the politics and culture we advance with our behaviour.
We’ve oversimplified the idea that women leading means different and better; that the future needs a ‘female’ leadership style. We’ve collapsed complexity and said that all leadership styles that got humanity to this juncture are “masculine” because males have historically been in leadership.
And while there is truth to this, those males were only practicing cultural codes. A way of seeing and doing and being: “logical”, linear, extractive, short-term, me-first, hard exterior, profit-over-people, etc.
And since we over and over again watch women perform that same ‘male’ leadership style — the opposite of whatever we think we mean by ‘female leadership style’ and female futures — we have to ask what that even means.
And we especially have to ask what that means in an AI-accelerated future. AI is somewhat agnostic as a tool. As many of today’s featured substackers reveal, AI — like humans — amplifies the cultural codes it’s given: Prompt architecture is moral architecture as
so compelling demonstrates.So which cultural morals are we giving this remarkable technology that could be our most potent ally in surviving and thriving in complex realities — and how do we make sure they don’t just regenerate more of the same?
It’s the system, stupid
A few years back I brought all this up with a genius queer friend of mine, a person I deeply respect for their nuanced thinking on issues of gender politics and feminist liberation:
What are we really saying when we say we need ‘female leadership’?
What is a more precise and less inflammatory way of saying the same thing?
Her reply?
The now/future is complex. We need leadership for complexity.
And so for me, when I say ‘the future is female*’, I am leaning into that.
I’m leaning into Dawn’s idea that the future is complex.
And complexity is not the sole domain of any gender, any neurotype or any political affiliation.
Complexity is also not something that can be disputed. It’s not a political idea or a contested idea like gender has become.
We live in it.
Unlike economics which is not a science or a scientific practice as
beautifully argues in this piece1, complexity actually is a science and actually is a fundamental part of physics and our physical reality.If we humans — all humans, regardless of how you show up in your humanness — urgently need to lean in to anything, it is this. It is capacity for complexity.
And critically, capacities are developed through practice. While some may have more aptitude with these capacities, anyone and everyone of all ages can learn them. They are what we are (supposedly) developing through training and education. They are muscles and you can train and grow them just as you would train your body at the gym.
For example, mindfulness is a capacity for complexity and we are starting to teach it to five year olds. Adaptiveness, generous listening, kindness, and relationality are also requisite capacities for complexity.
And I think this is what most of us are grasping for when we say ‘the future is female’.
We’re saying we urgently need a different set of capacities and way of doing things.
This is also partially why some of us can get so heartbroken watching female leaders — who we assume to be feminists, who we assume share the commitment to different ways of seeing and doing and being — replicating and leaning in to historically “male” ways of doing things.
Need I even mention Hilary, Kamala, Sheryl or any of the others.
And imo, that’s not their fault.
It’s the system stupid.
Complicated vs. Complex Systems
Our social, economic and governance systems,
the business as usual ones,
the bureaucratic noose-around-our-neck ones
are systems built for complicated realities — not complex ones.
And that distinction matters a lot.
These are the systems that govern our lives, the ones we constantly talk about here, the systems that try to say there’s only one right “masculine” way to organize and lead.
Those systems are held in place by culture and culture is always a performance — a practice. And practices require capacities. Maybe more precisely, practices develop capacities.
That’s why gender’s not what we’re actually talking about when we say the future is female.
That’s why you get Hilary and Kamala and Sheryl leaning in instead of leaning out to take a break, observe, listen deeply, and speak honestly about what’s really happening and how we as collectives prepare and adapt.
Community is the only scale that matters now
So if we are living in complex not complicated realities, with systems collapse accelerating all around us — ready or not — what does practicing 'leadership for complexity' actually look like on the ground?
What can we as individuals do to meet this moment?
It's certainly not about waiting for a new CEO or a different politician.
In a system where institutions are failing to be honest and adapt, complexity demands that we build resilience from the ground up.
It requires us to practice adaptiveness, collaboration, and reciprocity at the only scale where we have true agency: the relational scale of our own communities.
It is also almost the only scale where we can build trust as currency, IRL, among the humans, beyond the bots as
talks about.How that scales up to entirely different systems capable of handling complexity at the scale of societies is itself a complex matter in some ways.
In other ways, it’s super simple. As said above: focus on relational ways of seeing, being, and doing, where you live.
Make friends. Real friends. The ones you can count on and who can count on you.
Practice being better, kinder humans together.
Make plans together. Plans to hang out. Plans to celebrate. But also plans to survive what’s coming. And plans to thrive as best as possible through it all.
Because ask any recent survivor of any number of climate disasters: no one is coming to save you.
And if you think that’s dramatic or Pollyanna, I promise you it’s neither.
But since we still usually believe men more than women, take them seriously when they say the same thing a woman tried to say, recall that a few weeks ago David Suzuki — a Canadian national treasure, globally respected elder and lifetime collapse-aware environmental activist — told us it’s too late to save ourselves.
He told us we have passed seven of nine tipping points in the planetary systems that sustain life and there’s nothing left to do but try to survive what’s already happening and will worsen.
While I don’t refute that we’ve damaged earth to within in an inch of its and our lives, I refuse to agree with him that it’s too late to do anything.
I believe we’ve still got at least five to seven years.
What I do 100% agree with him on though, is this:
“…what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together. Finland is offering a great example because the Finnish government has sent a letter to all of their citizens warning of future emergencies, whether they’re earthquakes, floods, droughts, or storms. They’re going to come and they’re going to be more urgent and prolonged.
Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it. Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the routes of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.”
o3. Today’s Notebook
Today’s Notebook is a great exploration. I hope you have fun with it!
o4. Featured Substackers
So much nerd love 🤓🫶🏼 to this week’s featured substackers and fellow She Writers!
What the MIT “Cognitive Debt” Study Misses About Writers Like Me |
When Your Late-Night Therapist is an AI: The Complex Reality of ChatGPT Emotional Support |
AI Won't Save Education (But It Might Help Us Rethink It) |
Déjà Doom: How Internet almost destroyed the World |
When the Bots Grow Up: AI, Jobs, and What Boards Need to See Now |
We Didn’t Train AI to Care. We Taught It What Care Looks Like. |
Vibe Coding ❌ Agent Coding ✅ |
Why China's AI Safety Regulation Challenges the West |
AI to the Rescue: 10 AI Tools to Fight Back Against Misinformation |
AI Exhibits Racial Bias in Mortgage Underwriting Decisions | Lehigh University News (This was linked by in our SheWritesAI group chat — thank you Karen!)
A.I. is exciting because of life |
Now What? What Parents Should Know as States Move to Regulate AI |
Also featuring a special contribution from
, a now-unpublished piece, in its summarized form, on AI governance and temporal collapse. Turquoise is updating the piece and I will include it here when it is re-published. I had access to it before they took it down for updating.***
If this piece lit up your brain and heart at the same time, sharing, liking, commenting or subscribing is Creator Speak for “fuck i love you, too”.
And let’s be honest this is still capitalism and this economy is shit (again) so I don’t use paywalls. If you’re in a good position and excited to
make a one-time or monthly contribution,
I’d be super grateful.
I’ll still fucking love you either way.
***
Economics is a social science and that distinction matters. Read Chevan’s piece to understand the critical difference. This is a wider issue that has plagued academia, a philosophical turn hundreds of years old, whereby the more holistic integrative disciplines of the humanities (primarily) suffered from ‘physics envy’ and reoriented their disciplinary practices toward scientific positivism to be seen as more legitimate and “as important” as the classical sciences. Chevan’s piece describes what all this means — and its consequences — very well. My version of the explanation is buried under nearly 20 years of cobwebs when I studied this stuff for a semester with Grandpa John as I lovingly called my History of Geographic Thought professor — not sure he loved that characterization as much as me.
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