Staying with the Trouble

The meeting has been going for forty minutes. On the screen, a fifty-slide deck. Around the table, two factions that stopped listening to each other long ago.

On one side, the alarmists: AI will destroy jobs, data is going god knows where, models hallucinate, we’re heading straight for the wall. On the other, the enthusiasts: multiplied productivity, transformed workflows, we’re falling behind if we don’t move now. Both camps have their figures. Both camps have their use cases. Both camps are right about something, and both camps leave the room without having looked at what’s actually in it.

That flight reflex is worth pausing on.

The two narratives that avoid the present

Apocalypse and salvation share an identical structure. Both project the gaze elsewhere — into a catastrophic future or a radiant one — to avoid having to stay inside the present disorder. Both are prophecies. And prophecies, whatever their valence, serve a common practical function: exempting you from acting here, now, with what’s in front of you.

The alarmist has nothing to decide because it’s already lost. The enthusiast has nothing to question because the technology handles it. Symmetrical positions. Symmetrical comfort.

What both avoid: the real work of composing with an imperfect tool, in an imperfect context, with no guarantee on the outcome.

Making compost, not prophecies

In 2016, Donna Haraway published Staying with the Trouble. The title is the program. Stay with the trouble — don’t resolve it, don’t flee it, don’t anticipate it. Stay with it.

Haraway sets two postures against each other: prophets (those who narrate the future, good or bad, to position themselves outside the present) and composters. Compost predicts nothing. It transforms what’s already there — waste, leftovers, organic disorder — into something usable. Slowly. Without promise.

This is not a philosophy of resignation. It’s a philosophy of presence. Staying in the room with what’s happening, even when it’s uncomfortable, because that’s the only place from which you can actually act.

Haraway was working on interspecies relations, the entanglements of living systems, ecological crisis. But the structure of her thinking applies to any complex system you’re already inside — where the choice is no longer whether to enter, only how to compose.

AI is such a system. We’re no longer before it. We’re in it.

What this looks like in practice

The operator who stays with the trouble doesn’t say “AI is a threat.” They don’t say “AI will fix everything” either. They say: here is what this model actually does on this task, in this context, with this data. Here is where it fails. Here is what that changes in someone’s work.

They test. They adjust. They fail on one point, start again on another. They don’t adopt and they don’t ban — they compose.

This is not a middle position, a lukewarm split-the-difference. It’s more demanding than either extreme, precisely because it provides no consoling narrative. No certainty about the coming catastrophe. No certainty about the promise to be kept. Only the work in progress, inside a present that refuses to be simplified.

Haraway would say that this is exactly where something can be built — not despite the disorder, but through it.

The third position

There’s a word for the posture of the unreflective enthusiast and a word for the paralyzed catastrophist. There isn’t yet a common word for the one who stays in the room, watches what’s happening, and gets to work with it — with integrity, with focus.

Nakkama tries to occupy that position. Not out of balanced temperament, but out of the conviction that it’s the only one from which you can actually see what’s going on — and therefore the only one from which you can build something that lasts.

It’s the most uncomfortable position. It’s also the least photogenic: it supplies neither the dread of disaster nor the excitement of the promise. Just compost, and what compost, slowly, allows to grow.