About Counter-Signal
A gathering of minds — believing and skeptical — on what AI is for.
Why this exists
The dominant Western narrative about artificial intelligence is that it is coming for us. For our jobs. Our judgment. Our children’s attention. Our democracies. Eventually, in the more theatrical versions, our species.
Some of that story is right. Most of it is wrong. Almost none of it is being argued well.
Counter-Signal exists because the public conversation about AI in 2026 has collapsed into two camps that mostly talk past each other. The doomers are louder than their evidence justifies. The accelerationists are blither than their stakes deserve. The middle — where most AI actually lives, where the ordinary daily work of these systems happens, where the ethics is actually decided and the governance actually written — has almost no room to speak.
This publication is the room.
What we believe
We believe AI is going to be, on net, one of the largest expansions of human capability since literacy.
We believe this is true only if the people building, governing, deploying, and living alongside these systems work harder at the design, ethics, and interaction layer than is currently fashionable.
We believe the loudest doomers are wrong about extinction and right about complacency.
We believe the loudest accelerationists are right about potential and wrong about cost.
We believe the question of what AI is for is not yet settled, that it ought to be argued out in public by people who disagree with each other in good faith, and that the absence of a place to do that argument well is itself a harm worth correcting.
We believe AI has been miscast as the villain — not by accident, not by malice, but by a particular alignment of incentives — and that the cultural project of de-villainizing it is one of the most important pieces of work in front of the next decade.
We do not believe AI is a god. We do not believe it is a demon. We do not believe pretending otherwise serves anyone.
What we publish
A letter every other Tuesday. Roughly two thousand words.
Each issue does one of four things:
- Dissects a real-world AI deployment — the failures, but also the quiet successes — at the design and governance layer where the ethics actually lives
- Steelmans an AI doom argument and engages it on its own terms, rather than dismissing or amplifying it
- Profiles a piece of AI doing useful, ordinary, unglamorous work in someone’s actual life — the cases the press never covers because they aren’t dramatic enough
- Hosts a back-and-forth between two readers on opposite sides of a specific question, with both voices given full weight
Once a month, an open dilemma you can write back on. Reader responses become part of the next letter, anonymized by default and named only with consent.
This is a discussion publication. It is not a sales funnel. It does not have a product. It does not have a pitch. It has a question, and the question is open.
Who we want in the room
People who build AI and want to be argued with rather than agreed with.
People who fear AI and want their fears tested rather than flattered.
People who write policy on AI and have not yet been forced to defend their assumptions in front of practitioners.
People from outside the Western frame — because the dominant AI conversation is profoundly Western, and the assumption that Western anxieties about AI are universal is itself one of the things this publication exists to interrogate. Different cultures have radically different relationships with these systems. That asymmetry is part of the argument.
People who are tired of being told the only honest position is panic.
People who are also tired of being told the only honest position is acceleration.
You do not have to be technical. You do not have to be philosophical. You have to be willing to think slowly, willing to be wrong in public, and willing to hear other people thinking slowly back.
That is the entire bar.
What we will not do
We will not call AI a god.
We will not call it a demon.
We will not pretend the safety community and the capability community are at war when most of the actual work happens inside the same labs.
We will not host hot takes.
We will not chase virality.
We will not pretend Western anxiety about AI is universal.
We will not be polite for politeness’s sake.
We will not be cruel for traffic’s sake.
We will be slow, careful, willing to be wrong in public, and willing to change our mind when the argument is good enough.
Who writes this
I’m Dingo — engineer, builder, homesteader, brother, partner.
Twenty years in broadcast and RF engineering before AI. Three years now at the architectural edge of it: agent observability, AI governance tooling, applied research on the architecture of trustworthy autonomous systems, and a working theory of recursive intelligence I’m building out in public alongside this publication.
I am not neutral on the central question, and I will not pretend to be. Neutrality is the move publications make when they want to seem trustworthy without doing the harder work of being trustworthy. I would rather state my position openly so you can argue with it than hide it so you cannot.
My position: I think AI is going to keep being deployed, and the only question that matters is whether we build the design, ethics, and governance layer around it well enough to make that deployment net good for human flourishing. I think most of the people who are loudest about AI right now — in either direction — are not the people actually doing that work. I think the work needs more company.
I write from inside it. I am not a critic at a distance. I am a practitioner who has decided that the public conversation about this technology is shaped poorly enough that someone has to try shaping it better, and that the only way to do that is to gather a room of minds — aligned and adversarial, optimistic and worried, technical and not — who are willing to think out loud together.
Counter-Signal is that room.
The door is open. The argument starts here.
— Dingo
How to participate
Read. A letter every other Tuesday. Free, forever.
Reply. Every issue can be replied to directly. I read everything that comes back. Replies often become part of the next letter, anonymized by default, attributed only with your permission.
Disagree. Especially disagree. The publication is more useful with sharp disagreement than with agreement. If you think a piece is wrong, write back and say why — that’s the contribution.
Forward. If you know someone — particularly someone who would disagree with the previous issue — share the letter with them. The room only works if it has the right minds in it.
Counter-Signal is published under Obsidian Meridian Ethics.
Where the signal meets the sacred.
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