Attention
Staying with the world long enough to notice it: a season changing, a face, the history beneath an ordinary street. Attention lets us see what speed, convenience, and the endless feed encourage us to miss.
Powder Groundthe unautomated life —
A life worth the trouble.
A movement protecting attention, creativity, authorship, and human connection in the age of AI.
A human life is more than its usefulness.
It is curiosity, friendship, play, beauty, memory, love, grief, surprise, and the quiet pleasure of paying attention. It is getting lost in a book, changing your mind, noticing the season turn, laughing until you cannot speak, sitting beside someone who needs you, and doing things simply because they make you feel alive.
Technology now shapes how we learn, communicate, create, remember, and spend our time. As that influence grows, we need to pay attention to what happens to our curiosity, our relationships, our sense of authorship, and our ability to be fully present in our own lives.
The Unautomated Life creates books, tools, and public projects that encourage people to read, think, make, notice, walk, and connect—and to build a life that’s more than the work we get done.
What we want to protect
Four Things Worth The Trouble
Creativity
Making, practicing, and getting things wrong until your own taste begins to take shape. Creativity is how you discover what you would choose, change, or make.
The Unautomated WorkshopsAuthorship
Remaining responsible for what carries your name. Tools can help, but the judgment, decisions, and final words should still be yours.
Own ThinkingHuman connection
Giving people your time, presence, and the patience real relationships ask for. It grows through conversation, shared experiences, and the small exchanges that remind us we belong to one another.
Hercules Bay Trail LibraryOur projects
Small ideas, rooted in real places.
Hercules Bay Trail Library
Read. Walk. Listen. Connect.
A planned book-sharing and listening library for the Hercules Bay Trail. Walkers will be able to take a book, leave one for someone else, or scan a QR code for a featured audiobook.
First location in planningSee the library project
Powder Ground
A love letter to Hercules, told one walk at a time.
Josephine Hurtado’s place memoir about the Hercules shoreline, the town’s powder-works history, and what daily walking taught her about migration, grief, safety, and making a home.
Book in progressAbout the book
Own Thinking
Helping children build their own thinking in the age of AI.
A guided process that asks children to form an idea, explain it, revise it, and reflect on what changed. AI can ask questions and offer structure. The child keeps the final words and choices.
In developmentSee Own Thinking
The Unautomated Workshops
What one pair of hands can teach another.
Small in-person sessions where someone who knows a craft teaches it by hand: pottery, bookbinding, drawing, cooking, music, writing.
Inviting workshop proposalsSee the workshops
What an unautomated life looks like
An unautomated life has room for curiosity, effort, pleasure, rest, wonder, and other people. You are present for it. You take part in it.
- Give another person your full attention.
- Read for pleasure, beyond headlines and summaries.
- Follow your curiosity without asking whether it will be useful.
- Cook, draw, plant, mend, build, sing, or write.
- Learn a skill that requires patience.
- Walk outside and notice what has changed.
- Leave room for silence, boredom, and play.
- Call someone whose voice you miss.
- Help without recording or posting it.
- Rest without trying to make the time productive.
- Use technology when it helps, and know when to put it down.
One thing.
Start with one thing
Choose one part of your day to keep in your own hands. It can be small: a page read slowly, a note written in your own words, a walk without a destination, or a real conversation.
The trouble is part of it.
stay close —
Follow the work
Get occasional updates about the projects, new writing, and ways to take part.