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Mar 9, 2026 • 6 min read

🤖 Mediocre men and their robots

The radical mediocrity of AI and why we keep chasing tech myths. Yarn-bombing Copenhagen's statues. So long Combined Federal Campaign. We hardly knew ya.

Ted Fickes Ted Fickes
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Mediocre men and their myths (and robots)

For decades now the nonprofit sector, like government and business and sports and more, has been convinced that more tech innovation will help it do more. Do better. We'll reach more people and deliver info and services faster–with less friction. We'll spend less and raise more. We'll spend less time on paperwork.

AI offers a tech as savior message on steroids. We will have efficiency, metrics and data, the precision targeting of tested messaging. Those are always what will fix what's broken.

That's what we told nonprofits 25-30 years ago as we started plugging them into the Internet. That's we tell nonprofits now when we talk about AI.

As I write this on March 8th the news is full of questions about the use of AI to target the bombing of a school in Iran. A debate over AI hides the failures - of leadership, morals, humanity - of men who make decisions with little care for the chain of events or even results those decisions create.

Today, March 8th, International Women's Day, is also the day when those men (with or without AI) chose to create a firestorm of burning oil that resulted in burning oil flowing down the street and days of oil-soaked ran over a city of ten million people.

It's a day to call out the extraordinary harm that mediocre men cause the world. Coddled boys playing grown up sit in the White House talking about warriors and war games and raining down fire while, on March 8th, they cause a firestorm that will, slow or fast, kill unknown thousands of innocent women and children.

The unpunished failure of mediocre men has created a system that rewards the destruction of whole communities, families, and innocent bystanders whose only crime is trying to stand between masked agents of the state and powerless refugees.

None of this–not a bit–supports the future, the security, the possibility of women of Iran, the Middle East, the United States, or anywhere in the world.

Debating whether or not AI played a role in the US bombing of a school that resulting in the death of 200 children only serves to obscure the fact that failed fearful men are in a position to do what they have always done–steal from the lives and futures of others to benefit themselves.

And don't look away from the women–and their stories–who, for pennies endure trauma to inform the models of surveillance, military precision, and efficient donor targeting.

Let's not spend our days strategizing about AI, Claude, Dario, Sam, LLMs, metrics, and data. The myths of tech are the products of mediocre men who create a mythology of complexity and control. More measurement, surveillance, and analysis will, they say, grant us a god-like mastery of the human condition. All without the messiness of, you know, being human with real people out there on the street.

AI is going nowhere and we should fight for a vision of it being led by and for community good. But that is not unique to AI.

You can't destroy the power of the mediocre man by paying him to use his tools to make you busier, more distracted, easier to control.

You do it with community-led stories and community-built work on the ground. Show people they're not alone, they have each other, and you.

You won't out-evil the mediocre man but you can build the people powered network that grabs and holds power. Or perhaps we can vibe-code an AI app for that.

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Bright Ideas

The craftivists yarn-bombing Denmark's statues. Sometimes one person's idea, not a big campaign, dings the cultural narrative. Thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman for this link! [Lisa Abend / The New York Times]

What stands out most in Madeleine White's [The Audiencers] wonderfully concise fundraising case study [Behind The Guardian's record breaking US End of Year campaign] is, to be honest, how much it parallels the strongest nonprofit fundraising campaigns I've worked on and seen. These are lessons that cross news and nonprofit boundaries:

  • Editorial and storytelling, not crisis or "tax deadlines" drive growth.
  • Effective programs work across channels and internal teams.
  • You give yourself time to test, evolve, and grow into the campaign.

Sea Change turns 20: Here are 20 things we’ve learned along the way. Congrats to Mark and Alia. Not many business partners get to spend 20 years together raising both money and joy.

So long CFC...it appears that the US Office of Personnel Management has shut down the Combined Federal Campaign, a program that lets federal employees make recurring donations directly to nonprofits using paycheck withholdings. [Alex Daniels / Chronicle of Philanthropy] 

Wonder what news executives really want from AI? Mostly just help dealing paperwork so they can, you know, do journalism. Read Dear AI: Please sell more ads. [David Grant / Blue Engine]

The AI-powered 'forever wars' start now [Simon Allison / Coda]

Trainings and Learning

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Hey. Ted here. I run Bright+3 where we give changemakers the ideas, inspiration, and tools to create content that builds stronger communities.

I also write this newsletter, Future Community, and run the Future Community Jobs list.

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Support Future Community
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Ted Fickes
Ted Fickes
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