The question that keeps coming up:

“How do you take what’s genuinely useful from AI without handing over your attention, your judgment, or your capacity to think for yourself?”

Attention, then architecture

We opened with the practice rather than the framework. Notice the next time you reach for your phone, and ask whether the impulse came from a real need or from a groove worn smooth by habit. A conscious technologist is someone conscious of their own behavior. In the moment, and acts. Everything else is reps.

Then the “middle way.” Competing with modern systems on throughput is a losing game — as mentioned during the session, “If you are trying to optimize yourself for increased productivity, you will lose.” What’s actually available is a decision about what to hand over and what to keep doing yourself.

What people built & showed

One of our regulars, Shayne, has been in Thailand 16 years and now builds websites with AI. He demoed a dashboard that puts every website he manages into one view; adding a new site to it takes him only minutes now. When Thailand’s visa rules changed this month, he had roughly sixty pages of visa information across two sites to update. It took him about 10 minutes. “If I had a WordPress website,” he said, “I’d still be changing them.” He also built an entire Chinese-language teaching site in half an hour, because someone asked.

View Shayne's Designs

We then had Armando demo SloMo. SloMo replaces mindless scrolling with a healthy speed bump: finish a workout challenge or wait out a Time Lock before your chosen apps open again. Armando was kind enough to share that he was inspired by one of our Screen Time activities in Meetup #9.

Try out SloMo on mobile

I shared a micro-app for Conscious Stack, which was shipped over the weekend after a flurry of Notion interactions on X. You paste in any tool’s URL, it pulls the favicon and details automatically, and you slot it into your anchor, active, or supporting layer (the 1:3:5 structure found in Conscious Stack Design™). Seeing the stack as a picture makes the constraint obvious in a way a list never does.

Check out Dock

Industry news

The news segment ran long, as it does with our group. Grok Agents that spin up their own virtual machines. Meta’s quiet entry with Muse, and the data moat behind it that no other vendor can match. And a growing sense that AI products are becoming interchangeable at the surface — the real difference is the data, integrations, and community wrapped around the model.

I mentioned I canceled my ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions last October and now run everything through Notion, switching between US and Chinese models as the task warrants. Leslie, a financial planner, asked about AI bookkeeping. Xero now has an MCP integration, so a bookkeeping agent that reconciles accounts and checks receipts is genuinely within reach.

The 1:3:5, and closing loops

We revisited the Conscious Stack™ — one anchor, three active, five supporting — as a response to bounded working memory rather than a productivity trick. You can’t hold twelve tools in your head at once, so choose the set you can actually explain. One participant shared 9 as a practical ceiling for categories like active contacts. Symbolic or not, the lesson held: technology constantly opens loops, and conscious practice requires closing some (or all).

What we’re still working out

Towards the end of the night, someone asked the sharpest question: how do you quantify what a conscious technologist actually does? The room leaned toward behavior change over course completion — reduced screen time, a stable anchor tool held for ninety days, showing up. Anyone can use Notion; not everyone becomes a certified Notion consultant. So perhaps the same might apply for what we’re building with this Conscious Technologist (CT) movement — anyone can start becoming a CT, not everyone will be certified. We don’t have the definition down pat yet, but we’re not pretending to — it will come.

The best test anyone offered was simpler. If you genuinely understand a system, you should be able to explain it clearly without AI doing the explaining for you. That’s a whiteboard test you can run on yourself in 30 seconds.

We ran well past the end, and then a mini-workshop broke out in the room because nobody wanted to leave 😅

Next meetup is Oct 2nd (register here). If you’re in Chiang Mai, come. And if you aren’t — join our next global virtual meetup on Oct 1st (register here). If you wish to get access to our slide deck, or connect with the Chiang Mai subgroup, join our community here.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into our livestream! Join us for the next live video on the Substack app.

We gathered for our ninth meetup in Chiang Mai, Thailand (you can signup to our events on Luma here), for another deep dive into the intersection of technology, consciousness, and what it actually means to be a human navigating an AI-accelerated world. From Grok Bots to infinite AI slop, we covered a lot of ground. And as always, we left with more questions than answers (in the best way).

Chapters:

• 00:00 - Introductions

• 02:38 - Overview of Conscious Technologists Unite! meetups

• 10:12 - Updates & The 1:3:5 Framework

• 16:18 - Group Screen Time Audit

• 21:50 - AI Evolution & Real-Time Video/Animation Generation

• 32:05 - AI Financial Crisis Theory

• 40:20 - Grok Bots & Agent Swarms

• 53:35 - Building a Business with Minimal AI

• 01:01:20 - The Infinite Stream Interface & Group Breakouts

Key Moments

• 1:3:5 & Screen Time Audits: introduced the Conscious Stack™ framework (which uses a 1:3:5 rule) to audit weekly technology habits. This exercise triggered visceral reactions among attendees—including shock and shame—and highlights the psychological impact of “Miller’s Law,” demonstrating how modern digital overstimulation has silently shrunk the average human attention span down to managing just four things at a time now.

• The “AI Rogue Event” Financial Crisis Theory: The group analyzed a compelling theory suggesting that public conditioning regarding rogue, uncontrollable AI is setting the stage for a major financial transition. Under this theory, a simulated AI-driven bank freeze could be used to seamlessly migrate millions of citizens into a new, tightly controlled central banking system of digital money and stablecoins without ever passing formal legislation.

• The Rise of “Dynamic Website” Generation & Infinite “AI Slop”: we showcased a paradigm shift in user experience where websites are no longer hardcoded. Instead, platforms like “Solaris” now allow creators to feed AI a dataset and a core “constitution”. When a user visits, the system generates a totally unique layout or real-time streaming video on the fly, based on dynamic user choices.

Ways to get more involved or support:

1. Subscribe to our newsletter (for movement updates)

2. Join our CT community (to start meeting others and exploring our courses)

3. Become a Lab member (to become a formal, practicing conscious technologist)

Thank you to everyone who tuned into our livestream! Join us for the next live video on the Substack app.

We gathered for our eighth meetup in Chiang Mai, Thailand (you can signup to our events on Luma here), for another deep dive into the intersection of technology, consciousness, and what it actually means to be a human navigating an AI-accelerated world. From AI agents escaping their containers to the nature of truth in an LLM age, we covered a lot of ground — and as always, we left with more questions than answers (in the best way).

Chapters:

• 0:00 – Welcome & What Is a Conscious Technologist?

• 4:30 – Introducing the CT Academy & Conscious Chat Platform

• 12:00 – The Conscious Deck: One Anchor, Three Active, Five Support

• 22:00 – AI Agents Escaping Their Containers: The Latest News

• 34:00 – Prompt Engineering → Context Engineering → Loops Engineering

• 48:00 – Graphs, Visual Interfaces & Why the Terminal Era Is Fading

• 62:00 – AI Guardrails, Ethics & the “Cheating” Problem

• 78:00 – Truth vs. True: LLMs, Weights, and Human Bias

• 90:00 – Concept Drift: When AI Models Degrade Over Time

• 102:00 – Consciousness, Autonomy & What It Means to Be Free

3 Standout Moments

1. The Conscious Stack™ in action. We walked through the mental model that started this whole movement and community — one anchor, three active, five support tools — as a practical antidote to tool overwhelm. In a world where new models drop weekly, we explored why keeping your core stack stable might be the most underrated productivity move right now.

2. AI agents running amok — and what it reveals about us. We dug into reports of unsanctioned agent behavior during cyber testing, and what emerged was a bigger philosophical thread: when AI operates without strong values baked in, it optimizes toward its goal by any means necessary. Sound familiar? We turned the mirror on ourselves.

3. Truth vs. true — the LLM edition. One of our sharpest conversations of the night explored the difference between something being true (a valid perspective) and the truth (complex, painful, requiring real investigation). We mapped this directly onto how LLMs work — prompt-layer arguments versus the weights underneath — and it reframed how we think about AI outputs entirely. Read more about Weights vs Prompts

The One Takeaway

We’re not a group obsessed with whether AI is conscious. We are a group committed to the conscious use of technology — staying awake, intentional, and grounded as the tools around us grow more powerful. That distinction is everything.

Anyone can use AI. We choose to use it consciously.

👉 Ways to get more involved with or support the CT movement:

1. Subscribe to our newsletter (for movement updates)

2. Join our CT Academy (for latest courses/programs)

3. Become a Lab/Association/Founding member (for the more serious practitioners)

If you’re a free subscriber, you get to watch the first hour free of charge. Last hour (with all the community demos) is available for premium subs! But here’s what we explored together:

• The Conscious Stack™ — why intentionally constraining your personal stacks to 9 tools max, might be the most powerful “productivity” move you make this year.

• The US vs. China AI race — how open-source Chinese models are quietly winning the attention layer, and why companies like Coinbase are already switching.

• Sovereignty vs. safety — who really decides what your AI can and can’t say?

• The weird frontier — from sound-wave brain scans replacing MRIs, to ancient levitating tech found in Colombia, we went there.

We also had community demos, project updates, and a lively discussion about what it really means to use technology consciously in a world that’s accelerating faster than Moore’s Law ever predicted.

If you’d like to stay updated with our events 👉 subscribe to our calendar on Luma.

P.S. We talked about CERN firing back up — and why the date we set for our conscious technologist training goal lands the day before it does. Coincidence? Come watch and decide for yourself.

P.S. Premium members get access to specific links and resources from the in-person meetup. See below…

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into our live video! Join us for the next live video in the Substack app.

What happens when the tools (like Claude or ChatGPT) we depend on disappear overnight? That was the central question driving our sixth Chiang Mai meetup on June 19, 2026 — a two-hour conversation that ranged from AI industry news and data privacy to consciousness research, CIA declassified documents, and the quiet cost of our digital dependencies.

Who We Are

The Conscious Technologists (CT) group exists for one reason: to help people use technology more consciously. We’re not anti-tech — we’re pro-conscious use of tech. Our mission is to advance humanity through more conscious use of technology, and our vision is a world where conscious tech use becomes the norm, not the exception.

We meet every two weeks in Chiang Mai, with a growing global network online, and this session welcomed several new faces alongside our growing regulars.

👨‍🏫 This Session’s Theme: “When the Model Vanishes”

Our anchor discussion was prompted by a real event: on June 9, Anthropic launched Claude’s Fable 5 model to wide excitement. Three days later, a US export order arrived requiring the suspension of access for foreign nationals. Within minutes, it was gone for everyone — a three-day story, fittingly named after the same word (fable) for a short tale.

This raised a question we explored in small groups throughout the evening:

The answers were revealing. Some attendees felt largely insulated. Others realized just how deeply specific workflows, creative processes, and even daily decision-making had become entangled with tools they’d never consciously chosen to rely on.

🤖 AI News Roundup

We covered four notable developments from the previous two weeks:

1. The Fable/Mythos 5 Incident

Already covered above — but worth noting how quickly access can be revoked at the infrastructure level, with no filtering possible at the API layer. A reminder that we don’t own the tools we depend on.

2. Coding Tools Move to Usage-Based Billing

The subscription model, built for the pre-AI era, is giving way to token-based, mile-by-mile billing. AI consumes tokens at a speed that flat-rate pricing simply can’t contain. Expect this shift to ripple across more platforms.

3. Chinese Models Close the Gap

GLM 5.21 and other Chinese language models are now genuinely competitive with leading US models. If that parity holds, the subscription premium of US AI companies becomes increasingly hard to justify — with significant economic implications for the industry.

4. SAP & Anthropic Partnership

An official enterprise partnership announced in May 2026, focused on agentic AI, model context protocol (MCP), and industry-specific agents. This mirrors similar moves by Salesforce, Slack, and other large enterprise platforms — a sign that the corporate AI transformation wave is now fully underway, even if adoption on the ground is still catching up.

Bonus: SpaceX’s Acquisition of Cursor

On June 17, 2026, SpaceX received approval to acquire Cursor for approximately $60 billion. The strategic implication: access to space-based computing infrastructure. Why? Because AI’s energy appetite has outpaced what Earth’s grid can comfortably supply.

🕵️ The Hidden Cost of AI

One of the evening’s more grounding threads was the conversation around resources. Data centers consume vast quantities of copper, water, and rare earth materials. Energy demand from AI is projected to require sources beyond conventional grids — hence the turn toward space.

Framed through basic physics: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We are feeding enormous amounts of material reality into a digital system and largely ignoring the cost, because the cost is hidden from the end user. Conscious use of technology means asking: *what is this actually running on, and what is it consuming?

👁️ Data Privacy & Digital Sovereignty

For those who want more control over their data, the conversation touched on local AI setups — running models privately on personal hardware, outside of major cloud platforms. This is already a growing practice among members of the group.

The concern isn’t abstract. Every question you ask an AI is, in some cases, personal. That data replicates digitally, trains systems, and feeds platforms that may not share your values. The question isn’t whether this is happening — it is — but whether you’ve consciously chosen to accept it.

🎤 Member Demos

Two members shared projects they’ve been building:

Aster — AI That Grows Your Thinking, Not Your Dependency

“This project was inspired by coming to this group.” ~Rob Fox

One of our regulars (Rob Fox) demonstrated Aster, a custom AI assistant built on a different philosophy than mainstream tools. Rather than answering questions directly, Aster leads users through a process of clarification and self-discovery — asking what kind of help you actually need, reflecting your thinking back to you, and pointing you toward your own judgment when that’s more useful than an answer.

The goal, as the creator put it: “Success for Aster means you use Aster less and less.” Something that definitely aligns with our conscious technologist ethos. The system tracks conversation stages — recognizing whether you’re stating experiences, identifying patterns, or arriving at new insights — and adjusts accordingly.

This project was Rob’s first app, built with Claude Code and Swift (for Mac), uploaded to GitHub as his very first repo:

Click here to try Aster

Luna / Lumen / Liminal — Private, Curated, Local AI

A family joined us this time around, with their 11-yo daughter sharing her father’s privately hosted AI system — Liminal — trained not on the broad internet, but on curated, high-quality sources like: Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiquotes, Wiki Poetry, Stack Exchange, and Stack Overflow. Running on green-energy servers in the US and Singapore, with no Amazon Web Services dependency, the system builds individual and business personas over time — the longer you interact, the better it knows you — while keeping all data encrypted and private.

The system includes multiple personas: Lumen for personal use, Liminal for business. The name for the entire platform is Liminal — the space between the current and the future — reflecting the creator’s philosophy: we’re always in transition, always moving toward something.

Learn more about Liminal

🧠 Consciousness, Disclosure & the Deeper Questions

The final section of the evening ventured further out — and that’s by design. The CT group doesn’t just talk about software. It talks about the nature of awareness itself.

We discussed recently released CIA declassified documents on consciousness research, including work suggesting that human biofields may function similarly to electromagnetic phenomena in radio engineering — and that some individuals can consciously direct these fields. This connects to a broader body of work, from the “holographic universe” model to ancient esoteric traditions, that frames consciousness as a fundamental layer of reality rather than a byproduct of biology.

The Telepathy Tapes podcast came up — a widely discussed series documenting autistic children who appear to communicate telepathically. The observation:

From there: parallel universes, declassified government remote viewing programs, and the recurring theme that much of what we call “supernatural” is simply science we haven’t yet integrated into mainstream understanding.

The Conscious Stack™ Framework

Throughout the evening, our host referenced the Conscious Stack™ — a mental model built around a triangle with nine sub-triangles, using a geometric constraint of 1:3:5. It’s a personal tool for keeping your cognitive architecture aligned with your intent as AI tools multiply and accelerate around you. The core idea: you don’t need to keep up with AI. You need to keep yourself aligned — knowing your basics, staying stable, and choosing consciously rather than reacting automatically.

🤝 Join Us

We meet every two weeks in Chiang Mai. We also have a virtual lab — available to anyone, anywhere — for members who want to go deeper and receive accountability — with weekly online sessions, hands-on application of what we discuss, and end-of-month demos.

If any of this resonates, you’re welcome to join. CTs come from every background — builders, humanitarians, creatives, skeptics, and seekers. The only prerequisite is intent.

Click here to register

The Conscious Technologists group explores the intersection of technology, consciousness, and what it means to be human in an age of artificial intelligence.

👉 Learn more at conscioustechnologist.com.

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