Zero A.D.

After Literacy

Debating Literacy, in Print Two essays recently came across my feed, each circling the fate of literacy in our digital environment. In https://hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/why-you-cant-focus-anymoreWhy You Can’t Focus Anymore [https://hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/why-you-cant-focus-anymore], Carlo Iacono argues that we haven’t become post-literate so much as “post-monomodal,” suggesting that our challenge is not the death of books but the casino-like feeds that fracture attention. In https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society [https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1], James Marriott strikes a more elegiac tone, warning that the decline of reading undermines rational thought, culture, and even democracy. Both are thoughtful and well-intentioned. Both are also written artifacts—products of print literacy, hosted on a platform still overwhelmingly textual. That irony is telling, and it points us back to Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message, and here the message may be that print still frames how we talk about literacy, even as the cultural ground itself has already shifted beneath us. Print is no longer the air we breathe—it’s the Latin of our time, lingering as a prestige language of culture even as daily cognition moves elsewhere. Literacy has never been just about private reading habits; it has been bound up with access to power, governance, and cultural participation. To lose print as cultural ground is not just to mourn books—it is to undergo a civilizational shift. Print literacy was never simply about decoding words on a page. It was the passport to cultural participation and political power. The Protestant Reformation spread not by sermons alone but by printed Bibles and pamphlets, giving ordinary believers access to sacred text without clerical mediation. The Enlightenment unfolded in coffeehouses, fueled by pamphlets and journals that circulated ideas of reason and democracy. Even the modern nation-state was built on print foundations: censuses, contracts, constitutions, and bureaucratic records. To be literate was to belong, to enter into the civic and cultural structures that defined modernity. When we speak of literacy losing its ground, we are not only talking about books—we are talking about the very operating system of citizenship. Print as Cognitive Training, Not Human Nature As McLuhan argued, no medium is neutral. Each one carries a cognitive bias, reorganizing how we perceive, process, and communicate. Print literacy trained us to privilege linearity, abstraction, and sequence—habits of mind that became synonymous with rational thought. The Enlightenment was a print effect, an intellectual revolution enabled by the habits of sequential, typographic reasoning. That training was so successful that we often forget it is historically contingent. What James calls a collapse of reason may be better understood as the waning of a particular media bias: the dominance of print as cultural ground. Human cognition did not begin with print. Oral cultures structured thought through rhythm, memory, and performance—communal forms of knowledge that emphasized participation and immediacy. To equate intelligence with literacy is to ignore the deep history of human thought outside the page. Print didn’t just elevate the eye, it extracted it from the symphony of the senses. Oral cultures integrated hearing, sight, touch, and memory in a collective rhythm of knowledge. Print isolated vision, abstracting symbols into marks on a page and training the eye to march line by line, left to right, detached from voice and body. This hyper-visual bias fostered abstraction and analytic distance—useful for reason, law, and science—but it also severed thought from its tactile and auditory anchors. In this sense, print was not a neutral upgrade but a profound narrowing of human perception, a tunnel vision that defined the modern age, which resulted in fragmentation, alienation, and a narrowed bandwidth of perception. When Print Was the Content McLuhan’s famous law was that the content of any new medium is the old medium. For over a century, electronic technologies carried print as their cargo. Radio read newspapers aloud. Silent films inserted dialogue and exposition through title cards. Early television borrowed the typography and layout of magazines and broadsheets. Even early digital platforms echoed print: blogs mimicked newspapers, while Facebook’s original “wall” replicated the public bulletin board. What has changed in the digital environment is the shift in what counts as content. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Spotify don’t borrow from print—they borrow from broadcast television, recorded music, and film. Electronic media have become the content of digital media, while print is pushed another degree outward, a ghost of a ghost. This may be why the sense of decline feels so sharp now. For the first time in half a millennium, print no longer serves as the scaffolding of the next medium. The Word “Literacy” Has Migrated For centuries, “literacy” meant only one thing: the ability to read and write text. It was the gatekeeper to education, citizenship, and cultural participation. But as the twentieth century unfolded, new literacies emerged alongside print. Visual literacy developed through cinema, photography, and advertising. Mathematical and data literacies became essential in a world increasingly structured by statistics, finance, and computation. And now digital literacy—navigating networks, interfaces, and multimodal platforms—defines participation in contemporary life. To speak of a “post-literate” society, then, may miss the mark. What we are actually entering is a poly-literate environment, one where multiple competencies coexist and overlap. Print still matters, but no longer as the cultural baseline. Instead, it is one mode among many, useful for certain cognitive disciplines but no longer the sole measure of intelligence. The very expansion of the word “literacy” reflects this shift. We talk of media literacy, emotional literacy, financial literacy. We even say someone is “literate in code” or “literate in design.” The term has migrated far beyond print, signaling that culture itself recognizes the pluralization of how we read the world. If the book was once a cathedral, literacy is now a bazaar—an open field of overlapping symbol systems, each demanding its own fluency. Print Absolutism vs. Rosy Multimodality James Marriott’s warning about a post-literate society is animated by what might be called print absolutism. He equates the decline of reading with the decline of rational thought, treating literacy not as one cognitive bias among others but as the essence of human intelligence. He is right to note that print cultivates specific mental muscles—sustained focus, linear reasoning, and abstraction. But he mistakes those for universal cognition, overlooking the oral, visual, and digital modes that also shape how humans know. His analysis risks collapsing into nostalgia for a media environment that no longer holds the cultural ground. Carlo Iacono, by contrast, emphasizes the promise of multimodality. He argues that we are not post-literate but post-monomodal, and that the real threat is the casino-like feed environment that fragments our attention. His optimism is refreshing, and his call for “attention gyms” acknowledges the importance of design and architecture. But he paints the picture too rosily, as if books and videos sit in an even balance. He underestimates the gravitational pull of algorithmic feeds and the way they restructure cognition at scale. That gravitational pull is not metaphorical. It is engineered. Autoplay ensures that YouTube chooses the next video before you can. TikTok learns your preferences in seconds and refines them endlessly, tugging you deeper into a feed you never designed. Spotify nudges you toward algorithmic playlists instead of the albums or artists you might have chosen for yourself. These are not neutral conveniences—they are architectures that seize attention and rewire habits. What once required deliberation—picking a book, a record, a film—now happens as reflex. And at scale, reflex becomes culture. The nutritional metaphor fits here: feeds are fast calories, engineered for craving, while print is slow food, metabolized differently. One is not better in every respect, but the diets they encourage could not be more distinct. The Academy’s Blind Spot James points to the struggles of today’s college freshmen with classic literature as evidence of decline, but here the academy’s own bias comes into play. Universities remain bastions of print culture, organized around linear argument, close reading, and the canon. To demand that students raised in a poly-literate environment collapse back into a single modality is less a fair assessment than a failure of adaptation on the institution’s part. What looks like deficiency may in fact be the mismatch between an older print-centric curriculum and a generation trained to think across modes—text, image, sound, and screen. Academia does not simply lag behind; it polices literacy norms, often stigmatizing non-print sources of knowledge. Professors scoff when students cite YouTube or TikTok, yet for many, those are legitimate channels of learning. Seen this way, the problem is not that literacy is vanishing, but that our institutions have yet to catch up to the plurality of literacies already shaping how the next generation learns and thinks. While the arguments of both James and Carlos have merit, they both miss the crucial environmental dimension that McLuhan helps us see. Print is not disappearing, but neither is it coexisting on equal footing. Its role is shifting: from cultural ground to counter-environment, from unconscious default to conscious choice. Survival Literacies in an Age of Abundance The erosion of print is not sudden. Electronic technologies have been reshaping our cognitive environment for more than a century, from the telegraph and radio to film and television. What feels distinct about the present moment is the way digital platforms subsume all prior media. Text, image, sound, and video circulate within the same interfaces, collapsed into feeds optimized for speed and engagement. This convergence makes the prospect of a post-literate society feel tangible in a way it did not even a generation ago. But post-literate does not mean post-intelligent. It signals a shift in how intelligence expresses itself. Instead of privileging linear argument and sequential logic, digital environments train us in simultaneity, pattern recognition, and navigation across multiple streams. These are survival literacies in an age of information abundance—different cognitive skills, not lesser ones. The danger lies not in their existence but in their capture by attention economies that exploit distraction. The problem is not only attention but comprehension. Studies show that across media—whether text, audio, or video—retention and understanding have declined in environments of constant interruption. Students skim novels but also half-hear podcasts, half-watch explainers, absorbing fragments without integration. The medium may change, but the underlying condition is the same: a culture of perpetual flow resists depth. It is not just that we skim the ocean’s surface instead of plumbing its depths—it is that the currents themselves are designed to keep us moving, never still long enough to sound the bottom. In this context, print does not vanish but repositions itself. No longer the cultural ground, it becomes a counter-environment—a deliberate exercise in slowing down, isolating variables, and sustaining attention. Like a cold plunge for the nervous system, reading can serve as a chosen discipline, a corrective to the velocity of the feed. Its value lies not in ubiquity, but in contrast. From Monoculture to Media Ecology It is worth remembering that both James and Carlo are writing in good faith, shaped by their professional investments in print culture. Journalists and librarians are, by definition, custodians of the written word. Their anxieties are understandable, even necessary, as we wrestle with what comes next. I share their concern for the erosion of attention and the flattening of culture in the feed. But from a McLuhan perspective, what we are witnessing is not the end of literacy but the reconfiguration of literacy within a broader media ecology. Print is not dead—it is repositioned. It no longer sets the baseline of cultural life, but it remains invaluable as a counter-bias, a training ground for habits that digital culture alone will not provide. To preserve print’s virtues does not mean resisting change, nor does embracing new literacies mean abandoning old ones. The challenge is to cultivate a poly-literate sensibility, one that can move between books, screens, and voices without mistaking any single medium for the sum of human thought. That, perhaps, is the true task before us: not to mourn the passing of literacy, nor to idealize a frictionless multimodality, but to navigate consciously the plurality of literacies that define our moment. And if we are serious about that task, it won’t just be individuals who must adapt. Our institutions—schools, libraries, universities—must also evolve, restructured to support multiple literacies rather than enforce a single one. The last time literacy shifted this dramatically, we called it the Enlightenment. We may now be standing at the threshold of something just as consequential. Get full access to Dead Air at deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe [https://deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Zero A.D.

Fall 2017. The weekends belonged to the “green room.” Not the velvet-draped VIP kind, but the converted garage in my screenwriting partner’s Santa Monica backyard — half man cave, half writers’ room. It smelled of stale smoke and beer funk, empties stacked in the corner, ashtrays overflowing from the night before. That was where Zero A.D. began to take shape. We were two guys with full-time jobs — he in music clearances at Sony Pictures, me freelancing as a TV editor. But we were committed to our craft. So every weekend we hauled our laptops into that garage. We’d just come off the high of finishing two pilot scripts with full series bibles, one even landing as a semifinalist at the Austin Film Festival, so there was momentum in the air. And fantasy too: we imagined ourselves as showrunners, running a proper room. In reality, the room was just us — a pair of weekend warriors—true believers. And what we were believing in was this: a show that didn’t exist yet, built around a time that didn’t exist either. Zero A.D. Instead of describing the concept, I’ll just show you the document itself. This is the opening from the Zero A.D. series bible we sent out in 2018: Excerpt From Zero A.D. Series Bible, 2018: ZERO A.D. does not exist. There is no such date or time. In the Gregorian calendar that we use today, the year 1 B.C. (Before Christ) is immediately followed by the year 1 A.D. (Anno Domini). That’s like saying the year 1999 was followed by the year 2001, and the year 2000 never happened. But something did happen. Welcome to ZERO A.D. The story of Jesus of Nazareth has been called “the greatest story ever told.” For the most fervent believers, it is gospel truth, while for others it is just that—a great story, a profound parable or a mere myth. ZERO A.D. is all of those things. How can that be? Because among its cast of characters are fervent believers, great storytellers, preachers of parable and mighty myth-makers. And… because ZERO A.D. doesn’t exist, there are no rules to how this story can be told. Think GAME OF THRONES meets LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. Everything you thought you knew about this story is ancient history. You’re about to see Jesus… and the Apostles… in a whole new light. So we start with a provocative premise: what if Jesus of Nazareth survived his crucifixion? And what if it wasn’t a fluke… but a well-conceived idea… a perfectly executed plan… a secret spiritual plot designed to change the world? Which leads to more questions. Whose idea was it? Who was part of the plan? And who knew about the plot? Welcome to ZERO A.D. That was the pitch. If you want to see how we carried it onto the page, here’s the link to the pilot script: Reading it now, I can still feel the ambition baked into those sentences — the voice of two guys convinced we were building a premium franchise from a garage with ashtrays and beer cans as our décor. It was audacious, maybe a bit naïve, but it was also pure. The pitch wasn’t just a pitch; it was a belief system, with scaffolding for a story we were daring ourselves to tell. And one of the main beams in that scaffolding was astrology. Not as metaphor, not as mood board — but as actual structure. We’d already used it in our earlier pilots, casting horoscopes for every character. Zero A.D. was no different. Jesus as the Sun of God. The twelve apostles as the twelve zodiac signs. Each chart aligned to real dates and ages, anchoring them in a generational and historical context. A character wasn’t just a bundle of traits; he or she was a planetary configuration, a web of aspects and oppositions. We used the charts to track relationships, conflicts, and the chemistry of the group. It sounds esoteric, but for us it was pragmatic — a fast track into character nuance. You want to know how Thomas doubts? Pull his chart. You want to know why Magdalene resists Peter? Their aspects will tell you. It gave us texture, but it also gave us rhythm. Astrology was always at the table, just as central as any outline or index card. That was the vibe of our writers’ room — even if the “room” was just two dudes, one garage, and a couple laptops. We fantasized about being showrunners, running a staff of a dozen. But in the meantime, we ran the room we had. And honestly, that fantasy hasn’t gone away. When I talk now about experimenting with AI as a creative collaborator, what I’m really chasing is that same energy — the hum of a writers’ room, only this time it’s virtual, recursive, and with infinite possibilities. The Loop: Cynical, Brilliant, and Maybe Necessary Zero A.D. lived in that green room for six months. We finished the pilot. We built the series bible. We dreamed out two full seasons. And we sent out into the world — one more spec looking for a buyer. Then, like so many specs, it slid quietly into the hard drive—the desk drawer of 21st century writers. Another dormant document. A tombed project, which was ironic given the story it told. And that might have been the end of it — another script on the shelf, another artifact in the archive — if not for something my partner started doing recently. He dusted off an old screenplay of his own and began “novelizing” it. Turning the script into prose. At first I thought it was just a side project, a creative writing exercise. But his logic was sharper than that. Hollywood is obsessed with IP. Original screenplays — unless you’re already a brand-name writer — barely get read. But if you write the novel version of that same story, suddenly you have intellectual property. IP. A book exists. Now the same studios who wouldn’t touch your spec might option your “novel” and make it into a movie. It’s cynical. It’s absurd. And kinda brilliant. A sort of ouroboros logic — a screenplay reverse-engineered into a novel, then sold back to Hollywood as the source material for a screenplay. He called it a strategy. I called it a “reverse-engineered IP loop.” And once he said it out loud, I couldn’t stop thinking about Zero A.D. What if the bible we built in 2018 wasn’t just a relic, but raw material? What if the project could be reanimated in a new medium? A novelization of the pilot and the series arc, alive again, but in prose — and this time with AI in the room, helping iterate, experiment, even test out voices and scenes in real time. This isn’t nostalgia. This is an experiment. Zero A.D. as both archive and live writer’s lab. The resurrection of a project about resurrection. Reopening The Room So that’s where this post leaves off: with Zero A.D. pulled from the archive, carried back into the light, and set down on the table again. Not as a finished script, not as a series pitch, but as raw material for a new kind of experiment. In the coming weeks, I’ll be documenting what it means to novelize a script in real time, with AI as collaborator. How a virtual writers’ room might actually function. How esoteric scaffolding like astrology — once spread across a desk in a garage in Santa Monica — might map onto machine learning tools in 2025. This is archival alchemy, but it’s also live signal. I don’t know yet what shape the book will take, or how faithful it will be to the original concept. I don’t know if this experiment will collapse under its own weight or open up a whole new method for storytelling. But that’s the point of Dead Air — to narrate the moment while it’s happening, mic still on, static humming. Call this the first signal check. The room is open. Let’s see who (or what) shows up. Get full access to Dead Air at deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe [https://deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Two Channels, One Dial

You’re in the car, late at night, halfway between two towns. The radio dial won’t hold steady. A rock station bleeds into a Christian station, guitars colliding with parables, a weird hybrid signal that exists only on the crest of the hill. Drive a mile in either direction and one station wins. But in that moment — messy, static-laced, impossible to reproduce — the overlap is its own kind of sermon. That’s what it feels like right now: living in the bleed between Peter and Daljeet, two signals I kept apart for decades suddenly playing on the same frequency. For most of my career, I treated those channels like they couldn’t overlap. Peter was the rock station — riffs and edits, structure and signal, the noise of deadlines and day rates. Daljeet was the preacher’s voice — myth, symbols, cosmology, the parables that gave shape to the noise. I knew they were both me, but I kept the dial locked. In Hollywood, astrology was actually too woo, too much of a career risk. Even on shows chasing ghosts through abandoned buildings, I couldn’t admit I was studying star charts after hours. So I learned to compartmentalize. Two signals, one turned down low. But here on Dead Air, I’m letting the dial drift. And it turns out the static between those stations is the most interesting part. Not clarity, not purity — the bleed. The messy overlap. That’s the frequency I’m listening to now. And if I’m honest, the bleed wasn’t just an idea — it was already there in the way I lived. I’d go from one channel to the other in the space of a single day, sometimes a single hour. I’d spend the afternoon in a dark edit bay, headphones on, tightening the jump cut so a ghost hunter’s flashlight beam landed just as the soundtrack gave its manufactured sting. Suspense faked, one frame at a time. Then I’d go home, dim the lights, open my astrology software, and watch Saturn make its slow crawl through Capricorn. Same body posture — hunched over, staring at symbols — but the feeling couldn’t have been more different. One was noise dressed up as revelation; the other was revelation hiding in the noise. I remember sitting in a glass-walled conference room, whiteboard covered in bullet points, planning out a so-called “reality” series around a cryptid hunter. The first episode had him flying to the Himalayas in search of a yeti. The room hummed with fluorescent light and corporate caffeine, everyone nodding along as we mapped out the episode beats. Later that night I was in a very different kind of session: in my living room, sitting on the couch, laptop open to a natal chart on my screen. A friend sat next to me as I traced a tense knot between Venus and Mars and how it played out in the complexities of her sexual identity. Both rooms were about pattern recognition, about making meaning from fragments. One sold spectacle. The other sought understanding. For years, I never let those conversations touch. Among the scripts sitting in my archive is a TV pilot I co-wrote called Zero AD. On the surface it was a historical fantasy — an alternate-take on the origins of Christianity. But beneath the plot, astrology was the framework. I didn’t just see Jesus as the Son of God, but the Sun of Gods, moving through the twelve apostles as if they were the twelve signs of the zodiac. Every character had a birth chart, a sky-map that guided how they acted and how they clashed. At the time, I didn’t think of it as strange. It was just how I built stories. Looking back, it’s clear: even in my “Peter” scripts, Daljeet was already at the table. Peter’s channel was always the riffs, the edits, the pitches in conference rooms. Daljeet’s channel was the parables, the charts, the archetypes that shaped the stories underneath. For decades I kept them apart, like presets on a car stereo. Lately, I don’t feel the need to keep switching back and forth. The bleed is there, whether I like it or not. Some days it’s jarring, other days it feels like the most natural thing in the world. What surprises me is how much I want to hear it now — the mess, the overlap, the places where the two voices won’t stay separate anymore. It’s not tidy. But maybe it was never supposed to be. And I think I’m finally okay with that. Get full access to Dead Air at deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe [https://deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Writing My First Book with AI

Setup I didn’t plan on writing a book. At least, not right then. What I wanted was something smaller — a way to test whether this machine could actually work with me, not just for me. I’d already tried it once, asking ChatGPT to draft an “astrological weather” post for Daljeet. It got the style right but the sky wrong. Still, something about that near-miss stuck with me. So I kept poking. Over the next few weeks, I used it to help draft several posts for Mutable Fire [https://mutablefire21.substack.com/]. They weren’t masterpieces, but they were proof of concept: that I could bring my own insights, my own voice, and get something workable back. That’s when the thought hit me — what if I gave it something bigger? Something I’d been circling for years, but never finished. Collective Souls. This was a series of Medium articles I’d written back in 2021 on the astrology of generations, which I had intended to turn into a book. I’d circled back to it a few times since, but always stalled out. I treated the material like it was too precious, trying to preserve the original words instead of letting them breathe. It sat there, waiting, while I worked on other projects. Now, with this new tool on the table, the idea came back louder: maybe the way forward wasn’t to polish the old drafts, but to start over. A page-one rewrite. Seed If the Medium articles were sketches, then what I wanted now was a real draft. Not a scrapbook of ideas, but a book with a spine. Something coherent enough to hold the weight of my worldview: astrology, history, generational cycles, and the cultural churn of living through the long tail of Gen X. To make it work, I needed more than a chatbot throwing words back at me. So I built a custom GPT, trained on years of writing as Daljeet Peterson — blogs, articles, transcripts from YouTube videos. I fed it the original Collective Souls essays as source material, but I didn’t stop there. I also created a set of knowledge docs, distilled from long conversations where I tried to pin down my voice, tone, and the way I use astrology as a lens on culture. That’s how “DalGPT” was born. The first surprise wasn’t what it wrote — it was how it thought with me. I could throw complex ideas at it — everything from evolutionary astrology and Jungian archetypes, to deep album cuts and obscure cultural references — and it wouldn’t blink. It would mirror the insight back, expand it, and often times sharpen it beyond where I’d left it. Suddenly, the problem wasn’t inspiration. It was management. How do you shape an endless well of responses into a narrative with direction, rhythm, and voice? That was the beginning of the real experiment. Process This is where the shine wore off. Outlines came easy — DalGPT could spin a scaffold in minutes, nested from meta to macro to mezzo to micro, until I had something like a paragraph-by-paragraph blueprint. But when it came to drafting? The cracks showed. Language compressed. Everything tightened down to short, punchy bursts, like copy for a blog or an ad. A book needs space to breathe. Voice, rhythm, tone — those things don’t survive compression. So most drafts felt flat, or worse: generic. That meant writing became rewriting. Dozens of passes, sometimes four or five versions of the same chapter, pulling the best bits from each into a master doc. Stitching. Re-voicing. Pushing back against the bot’s recency bias, its habit of latching onto the last thing we said and forgetting the larger arc. It was a slog. But it wasn’t dead work. Somewhere in that iterative grind, the machine started throwing sparks. A sudden metaphor, a structural suggestion, a narrative beat I never would’ve hit on my own. Raw material — messy, sometimes brilliant, often sideways — but enough to remind me why I was still in it. And the strange part was this: I never felt like the book was being written by AI. The ideas, the seed concepts, the structure — they were mine. What the machine gave me was variation, iteration, and amplification. It was like working with a bandmate who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get tired, and doesn’t run out of takes. You still have to produce the album. But you’ve got a bottomless reel of tracks to work with. The Studio The way I came to think about it was this: those first Collective Souls essays I wrote back in 2021 — those were my four-track demos. Scrappy riffs laid down raw, sometimes brilliant, sometimes clumsy, but alive with the first spark of an idea. A guitar progression in a bedroom. A groove you knew might turn into something more. But a book isn’t a demo. It’s an album. And that meant stepping into the studio — not alone, but with a strange new collaborator. DalGPT wasn’t a ghostwriter. It wasn’t even a co-author, exactly. It was more like having a rack of analog gear and a bandmate rolled into one. Sometimes it was an effects pedal, bending and distorting a riff I’d thrown down. Sometimes it was the mixing board, pulling hidden tones forward, dropping others into the background. And sometimes — at its best — it was like another musician in the room, pushing the track in a direction I wouldn’t have taken, but glad we did. The work was still mine. The signal, the melody, the intent — all human. But the texture, the variations, the sheer volume of takes — that was AI. It didn’t hand me songs. It gave me tracks. And it was up to me, the producer and player, to decide what stayed on the reel and what hit the record. That’s the role this technology plays at its best: not replacement, not shortcut, but amplifier. It multiplies possibilities. It pushes you to hear your own material in ways you wouldn’t have otherwise. It hands you the dials and dares you to tune the sound. Coda Six weeks. Ten- to twelve-hour days. Me, DalGPT, and a screen that never cooled down. By March 2025, the thing was done — a book hammered out of hallucinations, outlines, false starts, and a thousand small collisions between human intuition and machine patterning. Collective Souls. My debut. My first “album.” It’s dropping October 2025, self-published on Amazon — and yeah, that’s a plug, but it’s also a signal flare. Because here’s the truth: the tools aren’t neutral. They shape the work. They bend the voice. They want to compress, to flatten, to spit back something that sounds right but isn’t alive. The only way to fight that gravity is to drag it through your own circuitry, force it through your taste, your experience, your scars. That’s the difference between a demo and an album worth spinning more than once. And that’s what Dead Air is: the studio, in public. The record light on. The risk of failure wired into the feed itself. Sometimes it’ll click, sometimes it’ll blow out the levels, but you’ll hear it all — the drafts, the false starts, the sparks when something actually lands. Collective Souls is the first record. The second’s already in session. If you’re here, you’re not just an audience — you’re in the control room with me. Footnotes: Get full access to Dead Air at deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe [https://deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Why I Created Dead Air

The cursor was blinking. My home studio was quiet. I was drafting a monthly blog post for Mutable Fire [https://mutablefire21.substack.com/] — my astrology-themed publication I write under the pseudonym of Daljeet Peterson, a spiritual name I’ve used since 2020 for work aligned with my wider spiritual practice. This time, curiosity got the better of me. I wondered: could ChatGPT write this as well as I can… maybe even better? So I opened ChatGPT 3.5 (which was the current model at the time). The text box prompted: “Ask anything.” The synthetic voice was waiting for me to speak first. “Alright,” I said, half to myself, half to the machine. “Let’s see what you can really do.” I typed: “Write me a short blog post on the current astrological weather.” What came back was confident, cleanly written… and completely wrong. Not just a little off — the kind of wrong that made me wonder if the machine and me were even looking at the same sky. Full blown hallucination. That should have been the end of it. But something about the way it almost worked made me lean in instead of logging out. I corrected the errors, fed back my interpretations of the sky, and watched it return something surprisingly usable. This experiment as Daljeet was my first foray into human–AI collaboration. And now, Dead Air is the next evolution — a bigger, riskier, and more public one. The Silence After the Noise I’d been hearing about AI for a while — the hype, the fear, the hot takes multiplying like rabbits in a Reddit thread. But until that moment writing as Daljeet, it had been mostly background noise. In 2023, that noise was easy to ignore. I was deep in my best professional year to date, juggling multiple TV shows, clocking long hours in the edit bay. Whatever “revolution” was coming could wait until I had the time to check it out. Then 2024 hit. The work stopped. Completely. In my thirty years of making a living in media and entertainment, I’d never seen a year like it. The conversations in my corner of the industry had shifted: successful series being shelved, productions going dark, and there was an unspoken but growing anxiety about what generative AI might mean for professionals like me. The public discourse was a veritable hall of mirrors. On one side, you had techno-doomers warning of creative extinction; on the other, trans-human optimists promising a golden age. Both felt way too certain, and way too loud. I needed to check it out for myself. So I started experimenting. First with ChatGPT 3.5, then with image models like Stable Diffusion, music models like Suno, and a few other tools. The early results were clumsy, sometimes laughable — but there was something there. Not just as a novelty, but an emerging set of tools I could actually see myself working with. Tools that, in the right hands, might bypass the gatekeepers entirely. That’s when I decided: I wasn’t going to wait for the industry to tell me how this was going to go. I was going to run my own experiment, in public. Dead Air is becoming that experiment. Test Signals Dead Air is conceived as a creativity lab where human ingenuity and machine intelligence meet to make stories, write essays, and run media experiments — with the process made visible as part of the work. That means you’ll see the seams. You’ll see the moments when I steer the machine, when it surprises me, when it misses the point, and when it nails something I couldn’t have written or created alone. This is not an AI fan club. It’s not an anti-AI manifesto. It’s not a tech blog or a productivity hack feed. I’m not here to report the latest model release or debate AI ethics like it’s an abstract thought experiment. [Process interjection]: Notice the literary tic here. LLM's like ChatGPT just love to tell you what things are not. They programmatically default to structuring sentences that follow a “not X, but Y” logic. It’s called antithesis in classic rhetoric. You're probably seeing it everywhere these days. Sure, it's effective communication, but when overused it’s annoying— the indelible fingerprint of predictable AI output. As a human, I'm more inclined to lead with what a thing “is” rather than what it “is not.” So... Dead Air is about using the tools in real time, as a working creative, and showing you what happens. It’s about the collision between decades of analog experience and a new kind of digital collaborator. The experiment is open-ended. The methods will change. The tone will shift from personal to analytical and back again. And somewhere in the middle of that oscillation, something interesting just might happen. Why Do This in Public? Because the only way I know how to make sense of something this big is to get my hands dirty with it. I’m not interested in watching the AI conversation from the cheap seats while people on both extremes scream about salvation or extinction. I need to see it, feel it, break it, and build with it. And I want you to see it too. Not the polished, retrofitted “look how smart I was all along” version, but the messy middle where I’m still figuring it all out. I’ve been in creative media for thirty years — long enough to recognize an inflection point when I see one. This feels like our Gutenberg moment: a shift in the means of creative production so profound that it could reshape the culture from the ground up. If working creatives aren’t part of the conversation now, the conversation will move on without us. So this is me staking my claim. Not as an evangelist or a doomsayer, but as a maker. My hunch is that these tools can be used to bypass the old gatekeepers — but also that they could just as easily build new ones if we’re not careful. The only way to know is to run the experiment in full view, and to be honest about what works, what fails, and what feels misaligned. Where This Could Go I don’t know exactly where Dead Air will land — and that’s the point. I’m not building toward some neat, TED-ready conclusion. I’m building toward a body of work that could only have been made by this human and these tools, in this particular moment in time. Some threads might lead to fully developed screenplays or serialized fiction. Others might branch into essays that pick apart the media we’re swimming in. A few might dissolve into experiments that never make it past the prototype stage. All of it will live here — the successes, the misfires, and the beautiful mess in between. If it works, Dead Air could spin off into other identities, other publications, even other voices entirely. It could become a network of semi-sentient creative projects, all incubated here. Or it could remain what it is now: one human and one machine, brainstorming, dialoging, and seeing what comes through. The only thing I can promise is that you’ll get the real process, not the retroactive myth. The dial will stay open, the static will be part of the soundtrack, and if we’re lucky, the occasional moment of pure, clear signal will cut through. Somewhere past the static, a story is already taking shape. I don’t know the plot yet. And the ending’s not written. But the mic is live, and the channel is wide open. Stay tuned. Footnotes: Get full access to Dead Air at deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe [https://deadairhead.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]