This Is Not a Site About AI.
It is a site about fire.
About what humans do when a tool is powerful enough to reorganize the conditions of life. About AI as a cultural problem before it is a technical one. About adoption at the pace of human beings.
AI Is Our New Fire…After the Printing Press, TV, Autotune…you get it.
Fire did not become civilization because it existed. It became civilization because people built practices around it: containment, teaching, rhythm, stewardship, and ritual. AI is following the same path.
"The question is not whether we can use it. The question is how we will live with it."
Fire is not just power. It is organized power.
The Oldest Frame.
Fire changed energy, time, labor, protection, and gathering. It restructured the human day and the human social world. It was never simply discovered; it had to be learned, tended, contained, and shared. That is what makes it the right metaphor for AI.
"When our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began." — Richard Wrangham
No Technology Arrives Alone.
Fire, print, television, software, and AI do not simply add new functions. They reorganize the environments in which people perceive, relate, decide, and build institutions. The history of innovation is not just a history of inventions. It is a history of changed conditions of life.
Marshall McLuhan's studies of the printing press and television showed that major media technologies reshape consciousness, perception, and social organization as systems — not just as tools.
AI belongs in that lineage.
Capability Without Culture is a Deadstart.
Organizations are moving quickly toward AI capability. But capability is not adoption, and adoption is not alignment. AI appears in fragments: shadow tools, isolated experiments, uneven enthusiasm, unspoken fear.
The result is heat without a hearth.
Most AI Problems Are Human Problems.
- Tools arrive faster than language.
- Speed outpaces trust.
- Governance lags behind experimentation.
- Teams lack shared rituals for deciding what AI is for, when to use it, and how to contain its risks.
Ritual, Not Just Rollout.
Not just policy. Not just prompts. Not just pilots.
They need ritual: repeated, collective practices for interpretation, governance, escalation, learning, and care.
Victor Turner's work on ritual and liminality helps explain how groups move through uncertainty by building shared social processes.
Find. Interpret. Ritualize. Evolve.
Find
Locate where AI is already burning — official and unofficial.
Interpret
Ask what AI means here, for these people, under these conditions.
Ritualize
Build shared practices for governance, learning, and care.
Evolve
Adapt governance as tools, teams, and risks change.
A framework for strategic AI adoption
Find the Fire.
- Locate official and unofficial AI use across the organization.
- Surface shadow practices, off-label workarounds, local innovation, and high-risk workflows.
- Begin with observation, not assumption.
- Visibility comes before control.
This phase draws on anthropological methods and field-based attention to how people actually use tools in context.
Learn Your Hotspots.
- Ask what AI means here, for these people, under these conditions.
- Clarify values, incentives, risk appetite, and institutional purpose.
- Build a shared language for judgment.
- Strategy begins when observation becomes meaning.
"Representation is the production of meaning…" — Stuart Hall
Build the Hearth.
- Turn scattered use into shared practice.
- Create review rituals, training habits, decision forums, playbooks, and governance checkpoints.
- Lower anxiety by increasing legibility.
- Ritual is how a powerful tool becomes part of everyday life.
"There is no such thing as a machine that acts outside of relations with humans." — Lucy Suchman
Steward the Burn.
- AI governance is not a one-time control layer.
- It is an adaptive practice: measuring, reviewing, revising, learning.
- Mature organizations do not eliminate uncertainty; they build capacity to live with it.
- The goal is not stasis. It is stewardship.
Controlled burning and cultural burning offer a better metaphor than blanket suppression: intentional, situated, collective management.
Thinkers Behind the Work.
Victor Turner
"Liminality and communitas were the key to cultural creativity and change."
Ritual transforms uncertainty into shared form.
Donna Haraway
"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us."
Humans and machines make each other.
Marshall McLuhan
"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."
Technologies remake the conditions of life.
Stuart Hall
"Representation is the production of meaning through language."
Culture makes technologies mean something.
Sarah Sharma
"Technological change reorganizes time, coordination, and whose pace counts."
Power lives in pace and infrastructure.
Lucy Suchman
"The dynamics of computational artifacts extend… to relations of people with each other and to the place of computing in their ongoing activities."
AI is social before it is technical.he
Meet
Dr. Ali Maaxa,
Digital Anthropologist
- Digital anthropologist, strategist, and product leader working at the intersection of technology, culture, and governance.
- Researcher of off-label digital innovation, including fieldwork on how people use tools in ways their makers did not anticipate.
- Former enterprise AI and research leader studying adoption, non-adoption, and governance in real organizational settings.
- Creator of frameworks such as SAiAF and FIRE for leaders navigating AI as a human, institutional, and strategic challenge.
Bring FIRE Into Your Hearth.
Keynotes
On AI, ritual, adoption, and the human pace of innovation.
Workshops
For executive teams, product organizations, and cross-functional leadership groups.
Advisory
Strategic AI adoption, governance, and organizational alignment.
Thought Partnership
For institutions seeking a broader language for AI.
Writing & Media
Essays, interviews, moderated conversations, and public thought leadership.
This is not a site about AI. It is a site about how we live with our new fire.