A weekly newsletter about staying human
Don't Just Watch the Future Happen. Hedge Against It.
Hedge Against AI is a free weekly newsletter about building a good, sane, human life in a world that keeps trying to reward you for becoming a very obedient machine.
Essays on fatherhood, taste, real competence, and practical ways of not becoming spiritually disposable. No boosterism. No panic. No AI-productivity theater.
What This Newsletter Is Really About
Practical ways of not losing your mind while everyone else is trying to automate theirs.
Judgment Over Automation
Once everyone has tools that produce competent-looking work, the scarce thing is not production. It is selection. Taste, discernment, and knowing what deserves your loyalty — these are economic skills now.
Contact Over Abstraction
Work a hard job. Raise children. Build something physical. Spend time with people outside your class. Broad, inconvenient experience is the thing AI cannot substitute — and the thing that produces real judgment.
Resilience Without Paranoia
This is not bunker fantasy. A hedge is just a way of not being totally exposed to one story about the future. More rooted, more capable, less dependent on systems you do not control.
Not Boosterism. Not Apocalypse. Not Office-Worker Cope.
Most AI writing falls into three camps. The boosters think every problem in human life is a throughput problem. The doomers talk as if history began in 2022. The cope merchants keep rebranding panic as opportunity until you end up reading sentences like “the future belongs to adaptive knowledge collaborators” and wanting to throw your laptop into the sea.
This newsletter wants something different: real examples from real people. What is the immigration lawyer doing? The truck driver? The parent? What is the person outside the Bay Area, outside the salary-negotiation theater, actually doing with his life?
From the launch essay
“A hedge is just a way of not being totally exposed to one story about the future. If everyone arrives at the same hedge, it is no longer a hedge. It is just another bubble with a better self-image.”
Co-Founder, Hedge Against AI
What You'll Get
One thoughtful email each week. Grounded enough that a normal person can still recognize himself in it.
Reported Profession Pieces
Real stories from truck drivers, immigration lawyers, counselors, teachers, and operators — the people everyone else has written off as "basically automatable."
Fatherhood & Real Life
One scene each week about raising kids, building practical skills, and the kind of competence that comes from contact with the actual world — not from a software demo.
Editorial Takes
Shorter pieces on AI hype, empty-vessel CEOs, fake efficiency gains, and the difference between genuine competence and expensive autocomplete wearing business casual.
Macro Context Without the Hysteria
Clear thinking on AI, labor, cities, and why judgment, taste, and broad experience may matter more as digital abundance expands.
Join the Weekly Newsletter
Essays, reported pieces, and practical thinking for people who want a human life that doesn't require becoming a very obedient machine.