Welcome to Intension

💭 oh, just contemplating the implications of a technology that will change the course of humanity as we know it for forever.......

Hi, I’m Halle.

And lately, I’ve been sitting with a kind of friction I don’t always know how to name… but I know that you’ve felt it too.

It’s that moment when you go to respond to an email and your mind toggles between different salutations, growing anxious over appropriate punctuation, and spending 15-minutes writing something that will take someone less than 30-seconds to read.

When you have “optimized” to the point of near auto-pilot, and you have no idea what’s going on but the mobilized efforts of your AI notetakers, calendar assistants, and tools are still making a concentrated effort to regurgitate productive-sounding noise back at you.

When you reach for Chat GPT to ask what you should be thinking about something, as if you’ve never had an original thought before.

And the worst thing is, you know that this minutiae of your day-to-day is just the surface of something that feels so ominously bigger than you, you think, “do I really have a choice?” because what’s the alternative, you don’t keep up with the robots, then you don’t have a job, and who knows what happens after that.

It’s called dissonance.

And it’s not just cognitive, it’s emotional, epistemic, existential…

The sense that what’s meant to serve us is shaping us instead. That we’re thinking faster, but not clearer. Producing more, but understanding less.

I don’t think it’s a personal failure. I think it’s a system failure.

At a time when AI is scaling by the day and the billionaire boys are deciding what the future of thought looks like, we believe there’s room for a different kind of tool. That’s why we (you’ll find out more about who “we” is later) started Intension.

Because dissonance shouldn’t be the default, and you should have a choice.

Welcome to our Substack. It will be piloted by me, Halle, with drop-ins from the team and other systems thinkers. Consider it a public thinking space.

Hey! It’s me! @halle-niehoff

I’ll explore what it means to build technology that honors how we actually think. I’ll write about design, cognition, AI, pop culture, digital identity, ethics, history, philosophy or whatever happens to be catching my attention that week.

If you’ve ever felt like your mind was scattered across a dozen apps, or like the algorithm knew what you wanted before you did, or like you’ve been producing for someone else’s system–this is for you.

We’re building Intension for people who want to feel more human, not less, in the age of AI.

And I’m so glad you’re here.

– Halle