If you enjoy this newsletter please consider giving me $2/mo to help keep it going.

This week’s question comes to us anonymously:

I did my job fine before AI came along. Now my workplace ‘suggests’ we use it. How do I say no?

Sigh. Fuck. Fine. OK. Buckle up.

Let’s talk about the 1990 Texas governor’s race.

In 1989, I moved from Philadelphia to Austin for graduate school. Having grown up in the middle of an East Coast city and suddenly finding myself in what was still, at the time, either a small city or a big town—depending on your world view—was… jarring. It was neither better, nor worse. It was just… different. So mostly I watched. I watched how other people behaved. I watched how other people interacted with one another. And I looked for cues on how to behave in this new place. (First parenthetical aside: In Philadelphia, when two people cross on the sidewalk you nod. The nod is an acknowledgement of safe passage. Much like clinking glasses during a toast started as proof that I had not poisoned your drink, nodding was reassurance that I was not going to turn around and stab you after we’d crossed. I was raised to nod. My first morning in Texas, I went for a walk to explore my new neighborhood and someone came walking in my direction. Just as I was preparing to nod, he bolted out “Good morning!” in a loud reassuring way not unlike Foghorn Leghorn, had Foghorn been raised a little further west. So that was new. In San Francisco, where I live now, people neither nod nor say “Good morning!” They purse their lips, as if they’re disappointed that they aren’t crossing paths with someone of a higher net worth.)

Shortly after I moved to Austin, Texas decided to elect a new governor. Mainly because the current governor, who is not important to this story, got caught with his hand in the wrong cookie jar. The Democrats decided to run Ann Richards, who I knew nothing about at the time, but certainly grew to admire. The Republicans, for their part, decided on a good-ole-boy cattle rancher from Midland named Clayton Williams. (Second parenthetical aside: At this point in history, this point being 1990, Texas had elected exactly one (not a typo) Republican governor since Reconstruction. One. So when they tell you that Texas has historically been a deep red state that is bullshit. It has recently elected a slew of Republicans, which is as much about gerrymandering as it is about any change in voter sentiment. Much like when California is described as a solid blue state and I remind people that we gave the world both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, which my neighbors love being reminded of, even as they vote for Daniel Lurie and vote down propositions to tax billionaires fairly.) (Wait, open the parenthetical back up. As long as we’re here—I should make note that Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Barbara Jordan were, at one point, the strongest political trinity in the state of Texas, and I have no particular reason to name all three of them today, but I enjoy doing it, and you should read up on all three of them.)

Anyhoo… Clayton Williams was very much a Texas “good ole boy” who made lots of money on oil, cattle, telecom, and other Texas-like businesses. He liked smiling, shaking people’s hands, being on television, and telling jokes. For her part, Ann Richards also enjoyed those things, and as an added bonus enjoyed—and excelled at—civil service. The media, both state and national, had a great time with the campaign, dubbing it “Claytie vs The Lady” (cringe). This all came to a grinding halt when Clayton Williams decided to kick the ball into his own goal and pronounced—unprovoked, mind you—that rape was like the weather and that "if it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” In 1990, even in Texas, this was enough to kill a campaign. Which it did. Ann Richards went on to be a fine governor. (Fun fact: her daughter Cecile Richards went on to be the president of Planned Parenthood from 2006–2018. Sadly, we’ve lost them both.)

Now why the fuck did I just write three long paragraphs about the Texas gubernatorial campaign when I’m supposed to be writing about AI? Because the language we are using about AI adoption is very similar to how Clayton Williams described rape.

“It’s happening whether you want it or not.”

“Better get on board if you know what’s good for you.”

“If you want to keep working here, this is what it takes.”

“It’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”

Am I comparing AI to rape? I am not. I am, however, comparing the language we use when discussing AI adoption to the language of rape culture. It’s the language of coercion. Language that implies a lack of choice and reminds you of the power those who are using it have over you. A lack of agency. It’s language that does not rely on consent, but instead the idea that we are bereft of choices, so we might as well get with the program. A program which is being foisted on us by—if you take a look at the group photo—men. And not just men, but men who like to cozy up to—and hand awards to—a convicted rapist. (Third parenthetical aside: in 2002, when the AI bubble was still a misfiring synapse in Marc Andreesen’s very large head (probably a result of eating a twin in utero) an AI Summit was held in the Virgin Islands. Specifically in the Virgin Island that was home to Jeffrey Epstein, which was convenient because the summit happened at his retreat. And yes, he footed the bill. The fact that Jeffrey Epstein was curious about a technology that eliminated consent should surprise no one.) These are not men with a lot of introspection. In fact, they proudly tout their lack of introspection. Which is a mark of a sociopath.

We’ve talked a lot about whether AI is “good” or “bad” and we should continue to do so. But it’s also worth having a conversation, or two, or a thousand, about how—and why— it’s being rolled out, at this particular moment in time, by this particular set of people, for whom the language of coercion appears to come naturally. And why people are fighting back against it.

Designers are notoriously disloyal, which I mean as a positive. Let me explain. When I was coming up as a designer, we used Photoshop to do all of our comps, a tool famously not made for doing comps. But it worked, if not perfectly. Every few years another tool would come around to knock Photoshop off its perch, we would try it for a few days, and inevitably sigh and go back to Photoshop. Not out of loyalty, mind you. But because whatever the other tools offered weren’t enough to offset the learning curve. Until the day Figma showed up. We tried it, and the majority of designers never looked back. Entire companies switched to Figma seemingly overnight. And here’s the important part: this didn’t happen because of some top-down mandate, but because the workers found a tool that made their job easier. It was, for the most part, a worker-driven shift. Like I said, we’re disloyal. We’re happy to adopt tools that make our lives easier.

And while there are certainly workers who’ve embraced AI tools—I’ll let them provide their own reasoning elsewhere—what I’m seeing is the opposite of a worker-driven shift. Management is driving the shift to AI. And it’s going as well as you’d expect. Let me give an example, in addition to this week’s question.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who works at a fairly well-regarded company in San Francisco. They’re an engineer. They’ve been working as an engineer at this company for a few years. They enjoy what they do, they enjoy working with their team, and from what they’ve told me, they do their job well. I believe them. A few months ago they received a mandate from management to start using Claude, and everyone got their allotment of tokens. Sure, they were open to it. So they asked management for guidance.

“How do you want us using it?”

“What can it help us to do better?”

“Where are you seeing room for improvement, and how do you see Claude helping us improve in those areas?”

These are good questions. They’re not the questions of haters or boosters. They’re questions of workers open to doing their jobs better. The answers they got back from management only qualified as answers because they immediately followed a question. They were told that from now on their jobs would be measured by how much they used Claude. I’m sure lots of readers are nodding along right now because they’re either in that situation, or sitting at home in the aftermath of that situation. For reasons that had nothing to do with the workers’ efficiency, or client satisfaction, or anything that even vaguely resembled the ghost of a metric, the entire team had to change how they worked, and the tools they used, for secret reasons. Naturally, morale took a nosedive.

“It’s happening whether you want it or not.”

Earlier this week I did a Q&A with the graduating class at Glasgow School of Art. I love talking to students. But more importantly, I like listening to students. I want to know what they care about. I want to hear their concerns. I’ve been doing an annual Q&A with this particular school for a few years now. Usually their questions come in a range of topics. This year there was one topic. They were concerned about AI. And again, it wasn’t whether AI was good or whether AI was bad, but how AI was being used to decimate a workforce they were about to enter. Most of them feel like they’re graduating into a field where they’re no longer welcome. We have a new generation of people who want to do the work, they’re excited to do the work, they want to prove they can do the work.

We’re going to lose these kids.

One of the things the students mentioned is they go out into social media and see “design leaders”—people they look up to—talking about how this shit is inevitable, and how it’s coming whether you want it or not, how we’re going to get left behind if we don’t comply, etc., etc., etc. And it makes them feel hopeless. Of course it does. This field (or fields, whatever) is now describing the future in the language of coercion. Because this appears to be something that the leaders in this field are very comfortable with. Force. They look out over a decimated workforce, struggling to pay their rent and they call it abundance. (For who?!)

These fucks have decided that the future is already written, and that it is written in their favor. These sad sociopathic fucks are attempting to write a future where everything and everyone behaves in a way that benefits them. Where no one gives them lip. Where no one tells them no. Where no one defies them. Where consent has been taken off the table. Where they can get what they want, from who they want, when they want it.

And that you should just “relax and enjoy it” when they thrust their vision of a future upon you. For which I would like to remind you that very few of you had any idea who Clayton Williams was before you read this essay. Because he was a loser. And because the future remains unwritten.

TL;DR: “No” is—and has always been—a complete sentence.

🙋 Got a question? Need an answer? Ask it! This newsletter runs on your questions.

📓 I’ve got a whole book of collected essays that came from this newsletter you just enjoyed. It’s called How to die (& other stories), and I’ve been told that it helps people get through shit times. Grab a Gilly pin and I’ll ship ‘em out together!

🥝 Speaking of which—the virtual book tour is making a stop in Auckland, New Zealand where I will chat with the amazing Sacha Judd, whose newsletter very much worth subscribing to! It’s either happening on June 11 or June 12, depending on which side of the International Date Line you’re on. It’s free, but you need to register.

🆘 I also do 1-on-1 sessions if you need advice. Just me and you.

🖤 RIP Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis is required reading.

🍉 Please give what you can to the children of Gaza. Our government is murdering them.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please give what you can to help Trans Lifeline help people our government is hunting.

Mathematicians warned against rising tech industry influence in a declaration describing the many challenges that AI poses to mathematics research. The timing of the declaration comes two weeks after OpenAI publicized one of its AI models as having disproved an 80-year-old mathematical conjecture in geometry.

The declaration was developed by a working group of 16 researchers over eight months following a conference held at Leiden University in the Netherlands in September 2025. Published on June 2, 2026, the resulting Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics has been endorsed by the International Mathematical Union—the international non-governmental organization that hosts conferences and oversees the most prestigious prizes in mathematics such as the Fields Medal.

“Mathematicians should find it quite striking that tech companies are suddenly interested in their work,” said Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London, in a statement. “The Leiden Declaration is a well-thought-through response to what is currently happening, as AI continues to disrupt this space.”

Read full article

Comments

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has six panels, each of which shows a different scene. The first five panels all feature cheerful robots in office environments.

PANEL 1

A shiny golden robot talks to the viewer.

GOLDIE: Good news! Here are just some of the ways AI saves you time and makes your job better!

PANEL 2

A robot – which seems to be a suit and tie with a smartphone sticking up out of the collar – talks to us. He’s carrying a huge stack of papers.

PHONE: Good news! Because your new AI agent is expected to save you so much time, the company is providing you with extra work!

PANEL 3

A tiny robot that looks like a ball with hands is bouncing on a desk.

BOUNCY: Good news! The AI agent makes lots of mistakes, so you get to do proofreading and debugging! Yay!

PANEL 4

A robot with a head shaped like a Telsa Cybertruck talks to us. A bunch of other robots are in the background.

TELSA: Good news! The company has determined you’ll get more work done with more AI agents doing more bad work for you to check and correct!

PANEL 5

A coffee machine with a screen with a happy face on it talks to us.

COFFEE: Good news! More of your colleagues are letting AI do their jobs, so now you get to fix that work, too!

PANEL 6

A human with a shellshocked look is walking on a sidewalk, carrying a cardboard box full of desk stuff in classic I’ve-just-been-fired iconography. A caption is shaped like a memo on paper.

CAPTION: Good news! We’ve determined that bad work done by A.I. is more cost-effective than better work done by humans.

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is obsolete jargon for what we now call “Easter eggs.”

PANEL 1: A poster on the wall says LESSER EVIL INCORPORATED. “If it’s not lethal, it’s a lesser evil.” A rat sits reading a book, Charlotte’s Web.

PANEL 2: A gigantic ant is climbing a skyscraper in the background.

PANEL 3: A picture of an adorable toddler is inscribed “I heart you Mommy! Always remember if u quit ur job I’ll starve.” A “to do” list says: “-Work -Work -Work -Labor -Toil -Lunch -Drudge -Slog -die.” A coffee mug, decorated with Charlie Brown’s zig-zag shirt line, has a mouse wearing glasses peering out of it.

PANEL 4: One of the robots is a toaster. The robot puppy has left poo (a steaming pile of nuts and bolts) on the ground. The cybertruck robot’s head is on fire, and if you peer closely at the passenger window you can see a screaming person trapped inside.

PANEL 5: The coffee cup has a picture of Bender from Futurama on it. There’s an electric outlet with two “faces”; one of the faces is the standard, the other one is smiling and winking at us. A poster says “NOTICE: Cups must be cleaned after death.” A cannister is labeled “82% real Sugar,” with an adorable granny mascot saying “What you don’t now won’t kill you, probably.”

PANEL 6: The box of stuff from the fired employee’s desk includes a coffee mug; the mouse from panel 3 is still in the mug. A jar on the sidewalk says “Background Juice” on the label.

And there’s graffiti! “BG” (for background) is written in a few places. Someone has written a list of jobs: “Priest Poet Lawyer Marine Squire Grocer Vicar.” (Let me know in comments if you know where that list comes from.) A game of “hangman” is in progress: “A_S_ER.” (You see the answer, right?) More things written on the wall: “Filler.” “Who reads this?” “PP + Marcie 4EV.” “E=M.C. Hammer.” “Mary + Charlie + Frank.” Finally, a poster on the wall is partly blocked by the caption, but I can tell you it says “Secret Hidden Text! Because you can’t read this text: At last, I’m free to say it: Basketball is BORING! Bite me, b-ball fans!”

Good News About AI and Work! | Patreon

This week’s question comes to us from Mat Honan:

I used to love to smoke. If it weren’t for the whole lung cancer, emphysema, death thing, would you recommend smoking?

You’re forgetting the smell.

Last week I was coming back from the record store and feeling lazy, so I jumped on the bus. A couple of stops after I got on, a dude got on and sat down next to me. Well-dressed dude, also carrying an Amoeba Records shopping bag. Out and about on a Sunday afternoon, doing his record shopping just like me. Within seconds it became clear this dude had just had a cigarette. And he stunk. The bus was also packed at this point, so I was pretty much stuck in that seat until I got off, which luckily wasn’t for too much longer. Also, it feels kinda shitty when you sit down next to somebody on the bus and they immediately get up. (Unless you’re getting a creeper vibe, of course.) I just had to suck it up for a few more stops. But man, it was rough. I’m not trying to disparage the guy or anything. Especially because I used to be that guy, and you used to be that guy, and I’m guessing a lot of our readers used to be that guy. We just walked around smelling awful.

Which is not to say that’s the worst part of smoking, but you took lung cancer, emphysema, and the dead thing off the table. Which leaves us with the smell.

I started smoking my freshman year in college. All reasons to take up smoking are stupid, but this one might be the stupidest. This being the mid-80s our dorm had a cigarette machine in the lobby. One of those old machines you might still see in old man dive bars, with two rows of big ka-chunky knobs, which felt objectively good to pull. It was like you could feel the entire mechanism of the machine come to life when you pulled that knob. And it took some strength to do it! But you could feel the knob hit a gear, you could hear the gear spin, you could feel a pack of cigarettes get pushed free from deep inside the machine. You could hear it slide down a little ramp, and then you’d see it appear down in the landing zone, where you’d push your hand past the trap door, grab it, and somehow have the pack open, and a cigarette in your mouth before the rest of the pack hit your pocket.

If memory serves, a pack of smokes was between $1.25 and $1.50 around that time. (Fun fact, I attempted to Google this and the slop top on the search results page said 26¢ a pack, which is… not true. But please, continue to rebuild society around such amazing technology.) Being the art school miscreants that we were, and also broke, we discovered that if you pulled a knob halfway out, inserted a quarter, and then pulled the knob the rest of the way out it would release a pack of cigarettes. (Ok, that may not have been the actual process, but it was a long time ago, and it’s very close to the spirit of the actual process, so let’s run with it. So I guess we were getting a pack of cigarettes for what Google’s stupid slop robot said, but it included doing crimes.) The knowledge of how to hack the cigarette machine spread through the dorms like wildfire, and soon we were all smoking. Because we were idiots. Also, it felt like we were getting one over on The Man. But mostly because we were idiots.

Also, being art school kids we were very visually-driven people, and all the photos of cool people that we’d hang up in our dorm rooms showed them holding a cigarette. And we very much wanted to be cool people. (True fact: take a photo of Humphrey Bogart, replace the ever-present cigarette with a vape and Humphrey Bogart will look like an herb.) Again, mostly we were idiots.

The vending machine company tried to patch the hack several times, eventually gave up and just took the machine away. This was our first lesson that sometimes doing crime is in the public interest, but that lesson didn’t occur to us right away. At the time, we were just pissed that we had to pay retail for cigarettes again.

By the time I started smoking society was pretty much done with the pretense that smoking was doing anything but murdering you slowly. I know this because we’d sit around in art classes making collages using old cigarette ads where doctors would tell you smoking was good for your nerves, and we would laugh at people for believing this, as we lit cigarette after cigarette. (Yes, you could smoke in class.) And we thought “Boy, our grandparents sure were chumps for believing cigarettes were healthy.” Then we would have a coughing fit. But there was definitely the sense that doing this thing that we all knew had a very very high probability of killing us wasn’t a big deal, mostly because we were in our 20s when nothing can hurt you, Reagan was president and, just to reiterate—we were idiots.

My first post-college job was at a copy shop, and you got one 15 minute break during your shift. Unless you smoked, then you could get as many breaks as you needed. Several people started smoking while working there.

We all stunk. We’d come in from smoking out back, and immediately walk up to the service counter to help a customer. A customer who either stunk as bad as we did, or had become inured to the stench because it was all around them, emanating from everyone.

We smoked in class. We smoked at the movies. We smoked at the supermarket. We smoked at sporting events. My friend Jeff, who grew up in Boston, tells a good story about going to Celtics games as a kid and having to look past the hovering cloud of smoke between the cheap seats and the court. We smoked in restaurants, where the smoking and non-smoking sections were often divided by nothing more than a paper sign denoting the territorial boundary. We smoked on planes, man.

It wasn’t too long after college that the world began to shift. In 2003 New York City banned smoking in bars. And I was visiting at the time. By 2003, I was no longer “a smoker” but I was very much someone who would look for reasons to bum a smoke from someone if the situation arose, and very likely to put myself in situations where it might. But I remember the rage from several friends and from the owners and bartenders of any bar we’d walk into. The ban was going to kill bars all over the city. It was going to kill nightlife. It was going to completely take down the economy. New York, as we know it, would cease to exist. Which of course, it didn’t. Everyone adjusted. They went outside. They eventually started smoking less because it was cold outside. People enjoyed being able to hang out in rooms that weren’t making them sick, and they enjoyed going home not reeking of cigarette smoke. If I could go back in time I’d reassure all those bartenders that it wasn’t the smoking ban they had to worry about. It was the kids who’d stop going out at all because they needed to sit at home and tend to their AI agents.

I selected your question this week because I’ve actually been thinking of the smoking ban lately. We grew up in a time when smoking, or dealing with other smokers was an inevitability. Even if you didn’t smoke, you’d most likely work next to someone who did, or sit down next to someone who did at a restaurant, or at the movies. And even if they weren’t actively smoking, and covering you in second-hand smoke, you’d go home with the stench of smoke all over you. Airing your clothes out was an inevitability. Having to wash the stench out of your hair was an inevitability. Society smoked, so you did too. Whether you wanted to or not. And then it changed. Most cities in America now have smoking bans and rules about how far away you have to be from a public entrance to smoke, which get enforced to various degrees.

The change came in a couple of very interesting ways. One, cigarettes are now hovering between $12 to $14 a pack. (I had to look this up!) They’re also available in less places. (You used to be able to buy cigarettes at the drug store!) Secondly, people just look at you weird if you start smoking now. Like, what the fuck dude, did you just light a cigarette!? Are you from the past? Gross.

Which of course makes me think of some of the things that we have currently accepted as a society, things which we fully know are not healthy for society, that we are currently tolerating. And also thinking there’s no way it will ever change, because we appear to be in an era of “what if everyone modeled themselves off the stupidest people?”

Right now there is someone firing up ChatGPT because it’s cheap. Right now there is someone writing a prompt in Claude because it brings him closer to his co-workers. Right now there is someone walking a co-worker through his agentic workflow, in the same way we attempted to impress one another by blowing smoke rings. Right now there is someone parking a Cybertruck on your street, believing that leaving his divorce where everyone can see it is somehow impressive. We have always been good at ignoring the warnings that came with the pack.

Our parents packed their homes with asbestos. They heated their homes with coal. They packed their Big Macs in styrofoam. Making mistakes will always be cheaper than fixing them. But nothing is more expensive than ignoring them.

Cultural norms are an ever-changing thing. History is the story of what was once desirable becoming unacceptable. Something that used to be an inevitability is no longer inevitable. Something that used to be tolerated is no longer tolerated. Something that was seen as a cultural norm no longer is. Even when those things were backed by entire industries with very strong lobbies, as the tobacco lobby once was. The same fate will someday befall the NRA. The same fate will someday befall AIPAC. The same fate will someday befall the slop lobby.

There was a time we thought if we prohibited people from smoking in bars it would lead to societal collapse. I think it was a good idea. More importantly, it was an idea that worked. It improved not just our personal health but the health of our communities.

The basic strategy of all addictive technologies is very simple. They make you feel extra capable, they addict you, then they make you feel inadequate without them. They start by making you feel cool, and confident. Relax. Put your feet up. Hang with the fellas. Social anxiety? It’s toasted, dog! Let me write that résumé for you. Anniversary card for your wife? I can write that for you. Light one up. It’s a great way to start a relationship. But that initial boost eventually turns to reliance, and suddenly you can’t get out of bed without a hit. You can’t write your kid a love note without firing up a slop engine. And suddenly an entire industry is telling you that you’re not capable of moving through your day without their help. An entire industry gaslighting you, until it becomes easier to just gaslight yourself into believing that you were never truly capable of things you are very much capable of.

I don’t miss smoking. Maybe I did at one point. But eventually the whiff of cigarette smoke went from smelling nostalgic to just smelling bad. Thankfully, knock on wood, I’ve been able to escape years of smoking without any major lasting effects, but trust that I carry every pack I ever smoked with me every time I walk up a flight of stairs. If I’m doing anything strenuous, it’s always my lungs that give up first.

Thankfully, I still have some lung capacity. I enjoy using it. You should too.

🚬

🙋 Got a question? Ask it! I will somewhat answer it!

📓 Get your sexy copy of my new book How to Die (and other stories)! And if you’re in the Bay Area, come see me and Annalee Newitz talk about it on May 11 at Booksmith!

🚢 My friend Lucy Bellwood made a wonderful comic about loss and building.

🙅 My friend Jason Cosper made a great tool for fucking with Substack’s dollar.

📣 I’ve got a few seats left in next week’s Presenting w/Confidence workshop where you can learn true confidence. The one inside you.

🍉 Please support the children of Palestine.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please support trans kids. And if there is a trans person in your life please tell them you love them.