There's a particular kind of ambivalence that lives in many technical people right now - a bone-deep love of building things and an increasingly difficult time pretending we don't see what we're building them into. This is for those people - a synopsis of my thinking around that ambivalence and a look into the toolkit I’m using to survive.

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There is a story I keep close about a high level executive who came to Plum Village to see Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen teacher of some renown. His conscience was eating him alive. He designed atomic bombs for a living and he didn't know what to do with that.

Thich Nhat Han didn't tell him to quit his job. He told him to stay. To bring mindfulness into his daily work. To bring his conscience and awareness of suffering and interconnection. To use his position to communicate his concerns and doubts - to give his whole company, his whole country, an opportunity to ask whether any of this was actually necessary.

I've been thinking about that man a lot lately. A whole lot.

Most of us in tech aren't designing weapons. We're building one component and don't see a whole weapon being assembled. That's the moral geometry of working inside complex systems in 2026 - and I've been saying for over a decade that technology is a force amplifier of who we are. In 2026, who we are is very, very loud.

The algorithm deciding who gets a loan. The platform routing rage because engagement pays better than calm. The hiring tool trained on historical data shaped by decades of bias. The surveillance infrastructure built by people who told themselves they were just building pipes. The AI scraped from the labor of writers and artists who never consented and will never be compensated. None of these feel like bomb factories from the inside. You're just doing your job. You're building one component.

And yet.

In August 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. St. Louis woke up - some of us for the first time, many of us not for the first time at all - to what it means when the people with the power to protect and serve decide that some lives don't require either. The uprising that followed went on for weeks. It changed this city. It changed me. The chants, the tear gas, the clergy in the streets. I wrote at the time: "Hands up, don't shoot. A prayer. No justice, no peace. A statement of reality, not a threat."

Three years later, when Jason Stockley was acquitted for the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, we were back in the streets. Different moment, same truth. The chant that filled those nights was: Who do you protect? Who do you serve?

That chant was directed at law enforcement, at an institution claiming to protect and serve the public while visibly doing neither for Black people in this city. But I have never been able to stop hearing it aimed everywhere else. At every institution. At every system. At every deployment decision made by someone who told themselves it wasn't political.

Who do you protect? Who do you serve?

Ask it of your algorithm. Ask it in your design review. Ask it when someone tells you the system is neutral - because no system built by human beings is neutral, and pretending otherwise is how we keep building weapons one component at a time.

A conscious power analysis - asking who bears the cost, who captures the benefit, and whose experience gets erased by the default assumptions baked into everything we build - is how we stay oriented toward the people most at risk rather than the people most comfortable. It is not theoretical; it is a real-world practice. For me it has been informed by philosophy, zen and feminist theory. For you it might be different. But doing it matters.

I have been an impuritan my whole adult life, a word and a practice named in Rebecca Solnit's work. The impuritan stays inside broken systems with clear eyes and dirty hands. The impuritan does not get to feel clean. The impuritan does not get the consolation of purity or the luxury of opting out, of walking away. What the impuritan gets is the possibility of being useful. Working toward mutual thriving and shared suffering reduction from inside the mess. My Mom had a saying - "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit." As I've gotten older I've grown to appreciate fit-throwers more, and often I am one. But I also appreciate those who work alongside the fit-throwers within the systems. I think we need all the people doing all the things to get through this moment. We need difference.

Our work of suffering reduction and deconstructing and rebuilding sick systems will always start where we are. The progress is slow, but it only happens if we make it happen. That has always been true. In 2026 it is especially true. 

There is no outside this mess we built.

Another teacher I hold dear, Joanna Macy, spent decades teaching that mindful presence and genuine connection will always outlast brittle optimism. Not hope as a mental narcotic, as Paul Hawken called it, but hope as showing up fully, with maximum skill, to what is actually in front of you. The pressure of relentless optimism can wear you out. Presence is better. Being present can build capacity. Presence is what allows you to keep going when the work is hard and the systems are broken and you are tired and you are asking yourself whether any of your efforts matters and if you are only justifying your own participation.

Joan Halifax's GRACE model gives that presence a practical shape - a tool for staying in contact with difficult realities without being depleted by them. Gather your attention. Recall your intention. Attune to what is actually happening. Consider your options. Engage, and End. It sounds simple. It is not easy. It is the difference between burning out and burning on.

The goal is not to be unaffected. Buddhist psychologist Mark Epstein, drawing on Winnicott, calls it a steady mind - the capacity to hold difficult experience without collapsing into it or armoring against it. Nonjudgmental awareness is itself therapeutic. The Winnicott line I have carried since 2014: tenderness can only be arrived at by successfully navigating anger's terrain. That capacity - to stay, to feel it, to not go under - is what we are building when we do this work.

In my life, Zen isn't spiritual software that politely reprograms my outlook. It's been a virus. Along with postmodern and feminist theory it got into the core of my being and scrambled my sense of what I'm doing and for whom. I cannot escape a constant power analysis that drives me to work in a way that I can live with at 3AM when I ask myself the only question that matters:

Who do you protect?  Who do you serve? It has become a mantra for me.

I have been working in and around technology for over thirty years. I place the people who build the things. I've watched this industry move from a place of genuine idealism - messy, imperfect, often oblivious idealism, but real - to something that looks increasingly like the bomb factory Thich Nhat Hanh's visitor was so troubled by. Disaggregated. Deniable. Dangerous. We build one component at a time but the weapon is aimed at us.

He told that man: use your position to raise the questions your whole nation needs to ask. But do it mindfully, root yourself in interconnection and community, and always center those most vulnerable. He charged him and all of us to do better. To be better.

That is what I am trying to do every day. I'm conflicted as hell about GenAI. I've been an outspoken critic of how it is a part of a dark and dangerous project. But not having people on the inside asking hard questions and bringing active conscience into play is not helpful. Thats where I've landed for now. 

I am thinking about turning this into a talk. If you have thoughts, I want to hear them. If you know a room that needs this conversation, tell me. If you are sitting with your own version of the bomb factory question - about your work, your industry, your complicity, your capacity to stay present with it without going under - I'd love to know that too.

There are no easy answers here as we swim in the mess we've built. Show up fully. Examine power. Center the needs of those most at risk, and always include downstream impacts.

And keep that mantra close:

Who do you protect?
Who do you serve?

Lisa

PS My obligatory commercial: If you are looking to hire people to help you turn this ship around please get in touch. If you know of people or companies I should know, telling me about them is very helpful. Then I can be helpful in the best way. I'm a recruiter!

NOTES

1. The bomb factory story. Thich Nhat Hanh, Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World. Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2003. The passage about the businessman who designed atomic bombs appears in the chapter on taking practice into the world. Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022) was a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, poet, and peace activist nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967.

2. Tech amplifies what is. My own formulation, first stated publicly in October 2014: "If we do not learn to be just and compassionate in our present, our tech will not solve our human problems. Tech amplifies what is."

3. Ferguson 2014. Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014. The grand jury declined to indict Wilson in November 2014. The uprising that followed is part of the documented public record and was foundational to the Black Lives Matter movement.

4. Stockley 2017. Jason Stockley, a St. Louis police officer, was acquitted on September 15, 2017 of first-degree murder in the 2011 shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith. The acquittal triggered weeks of protest in St. Louis. "Who do you protect? Who do you serve?" was a chant directed at law enforcement throughout those protests and during the Ferguson uprising before it.

5. Joanna Macy. The framing of presence over brittle optimism runs throughout Macy's body of work. Most direct statement: "I'm not insisting that we be brimming with hope - it's OK not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out, so just be present." Macy is an environmental activist, Buddhist scholar, and systems theorist. Key texts include Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In without Going Crazy (with Chris Johnstone, New World Library, 2012) and World as Lover, World as Self (Parallax Press, 2007). Also the best podcast ever "We Are the Great Turning"  https://www.soundstrue.com/a/resources/we-are-the-great-turning-podcast/

6. Paul Hawken on hope. "Hope is a mental narcotic that masks our fears. Fear arises from attachment. We need a movement that is fearless, not hopeful." From an interview with Tricycle magazine, subsequently cited by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and widely reprinted. Hawken is the author of Blessed Unrest (Penguin, 2007) and editor of Drawdown (Penguin, 2017).

7. Joan Halifax and GRACE. The GRACE model was developed by Roshi Joan Halifax, founder and abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. First published in peer-reviewed form as "G.R.A.C.E. for Nurses: Cultivating Compassion in Nurse/Patient Interactions," Journal of Nursing Education and Practice, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2014. Fullest treatment in Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet (Flatiron Books, 2018). Upaya Zen Center: upaya.org.

8. Mark Epstein and the steady mind. Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press, 2013). Epstein is a psychiatrist and Buddhist practitioner who bridges Western psychoanalytic theory - particularly D.W. Winnicott's concept of the holding environment - with Buddhist psychology. His central argument is that trauma is not exceptional but the ordinary texture of human experience, and that the Buddhist practice of nonjudgmental awareness is itself therapeutic. The steady mind he describes - able to hold difficult experience without collapsing into it or armoring against it - is the same capacity Halifax's GRACE model is designed to build. The Winnicott line that has stayed with me since 2014: "Tenderness can only be arrived at by successfully navigating anger's terrain." Other useful Epstein titles: Thoughts Without a Thinker (Basic Books, 1995) and Open to Desire (Gotham Books, 2005).

9. Rebecca Solnit and impuritanism. Solnit uses the term and concept across multiple collections including Call Them by Their True Names (Haymarket Books, 2018) and Whose Story Is This? (Haymarket Books, 2019). Full body of work at rebeccasolnit.net.