Greetings fellow human,
I don’t know about you, but I am very confused about technology right now.
One day I’m brimming with enthusiasm for how AI is expanding my sense of possibility and agency. I feel the pull to go all in, to merge more of my life with the machines. But the next day, I’m convinced it’s rotting my brain and disconnecting me from something essential about the human experience, and that the most sensible path would be to hurl my computer into a volcano.
But neither of those extremes feels particularly wise. I have no desire to live as a techno-maximalist or a Luddite. For me, the way forward is the middle path. The secret third thing.
But the question remains… how? As the public discourse around AI gets noisier and faster and more insane, I’ve been wanting a space away from the chaos to untangle my relationship with technology. A place to sit with questions like “what do I, Rob Hardy, actually want out of this life?” and “given that, how can I use technology in a wise, discerning way?”
Each of us has to wrestle with those questions for ourselves, and there are no one-size-fits-all answers. But I don’t think we have to figure it out alone. In fact, I suspect we’d learn more and deepen our understanding of the middle path if we walked it together. So I’m building a space for that.
It’s called Befriending Technology, and it’s part book club, part communal writing space, part discussion group, part show-and-tell, and part whatever else we decide to do with it.
Over six weeks, we’ll read two books side by side—one that’s optimistic about tech and the other that’s not. This reading practice is less about consuming information than creating generative tension, so that we can reflect on our own lives and hopes for technology. We’ll share earnestly what we’re uncovering, and have lots of juicy conversations along the way.
For me, I’ll be reading Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable as my optimistic book, and Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine as the dissenting tome. But if other books call to you, please sub them in. There are a ton of thoughtful books in this genre, and the more diversity of ideas the merrier.
I’ve added more details below. But for now, I’ll just say this is an experience I’ve wanted for myself for a long time, and I’m excited to start documenting my own journey down the middle path. If the third way calls to you as well, I hope you’ll join me.
October 23rd, 2026