I'm Your Huckleberry...

AI isn't the villain of this story. That depends entirely on who's using it.

I owe you an explanation for the silence.

For the past few months, I’ve been putting in 18-hour days — not doom-scrolling, not theorizing — but building. Upgrading the infrastructure behind ELLY & TPA. And learning, at a pace I’ve never experienced before, how radically the technology landscape has shifted beneath our feet. It has been equal parts exhilarating and overwhelming.

And it’s made me think hard about a question I suspect a lot of you are asking too: Should I be afraid of AI?

My honest answer: that’s the wrong question. The right question is, who is going to use it — and for what?

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Bear with me for a moment, because I want to talk about Tombstone.

Not the place — the movie. In it, a gang of outlaws terrorizes the Arizona frontier with a weapon that was then relatively new: the six-shooter. Compact, concealable, capable of killing multiple people in seconds. The cowboys didn’t invent violence. They just had access to a tool that amplified their capacity for it.

Sound familiar?

The pivotal scene comes when Doc Holliday — pale and half-dead — steps out into the street to face the most dangerous man in the territory. Johnny Ringo calls for a fight. Doc smiles and says seven words that end the conversation before it starts:

“I’m your Huckleberry. That’s just my game.”

What follows is the rest of the film: the same weapons technology that had been used to terrorize citizens gets turned back on the gangsters. The town is reclaimed. Order is restored. Not because the guns disappeared — but because the right people decided to pick them up.

AI is the six-shooter of our era. It is not good or evil. It is a tool of extraordinary amplification. And right now, a lot of powerful, well-funded interests are very busy making sure they’re the ones holding it.

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Here’s something I rarely talk about, but it shapes everything I do.

I grew up spending summers on a South Jersey farm with my old-school grandmother — a woman with ten children and hands so hardened by labor they felt like leather. She spent her entire day cultivating a garden, making butter, curing meats, collecting eggs, and plucking chickens. Every single day. That was her job. Her full-time, all-consuming, back-breaking job.

Then I’d go back home to Philadelphia, where my modern mother — exhausted from a long day at the office and a dangerous commute on the Kensington railway — would put TV dinners on the table.

Two women. Two completely different relationships to the same era of technological change.

Historians have argued, seriously and convincingly, that it was the washing machine — not any political manifesto — that sparked the feminist revolution worldwide. Hundreds of millions of women freed from the relentless physical labor of running a household now had hours they’d never had before. The machine didn’t liberate them. The choice of what to do with the freed time did.

Technology doesn’t decide outcomes. People do.

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Remember when Google made Trivial Pursuit obsolete almost overnight?

For most of human history, information was scarce. As a kid in a small town, if I wanted to research a topic, I’d spend hours at the library combing through card catalogs and microfiche, only to discover that the one authoritative book I needed, had to be requested from another library — and mailed to me six weeks later.

Then Google arrived. Suddenly, every answer to every question was in the pocket of anyone willing to look. And the people who used it to actually learn, to read, to build skills — gained an extraordinary advantage.

AI is that moment, multiplied by a thousand.

It is not a chatbot. It is not a search engine with a friendlier face. It is a platform for doing things that previously required teams of specialists, weeks of work, and budgets that only large institutions could afford. The people who treat it as a toy will get toy results. The people who learn to use it as a serious tool will do serious things with it.

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Which brings me back to why I’ve been quiet.

I’ve been rebuilding the infrastructure behind ELLY — the voter roll monitoring system that tracks irregularities across 45 states — so that it can move faster, dig deeper, and put verified, actionable data in the hands of volunteers and election officials who actually want to fix the problems they’re looking at.

AI is currently being used to generate disinformation and to surveil citizens. I firmly believe they are racing to build data centers across the county not to free and empower our children, but instead make a digital prison for them so the so-called elite can try to hold on to their crumbling power.

But that same technology can also be used to synthesize the oceans of laws and data and come up with solutions we could not previously imagine. It can also help us create the content to get that information into the hands of law makers and enforcer, as well as millions of Americans.

Spencer Pratt’s Mayoral campaign is good example of how a small group of individuals can now churn out creative video content that even just a year ago, would have only been possible with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

The cowboys had six-shooters. So did Wyatt Earp.

On March 5, 1836, Sam Colt patented the six-shooter and it was later said, “God Created Men and Sam Colt Made Them Equal!”

I’m not going to tell you I know exactly how this moment in history turns out. What I can tell you is that I am not willing to leave the tools on the table for someone else to pick up and use them against my children.

If we’re playing the technology game — and we are, whether we like it or not — then I’m your Huckleberry.

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If this resonates with you, the single most useful thing you can do right now is share it. Every subscriber who finds their way here through a share is one more person who understands what’s at stake — and one more person who might decide they’re a Huckleberry too.