Living near the Salish Sea teaches you that high-powered systems don't disappear because you ignore them. They require stewardship, attention, and care.

The Salish Sea is not neutral. It carries cargo ships, naval traffic, fishing boats, ferries, toxins, histories, treaties, migrations, and lives. Shaped by extraction and protection simultaneously. You can love it deeply and still know it is under constant pressure from systems far larger than any individual.

Walking away doesn't make the water safer. Learning how to navigate it just might.

Lately, I've been thinking about AI in the same way. When I use the term "AI" here, I'm not talking about a single technology or some imagined sentient future. I'm mostly referring to today's generative and agentic systems — built on large language models and other forms of machine learning — that are already being deployed across everyday life.

The question I've been sitting with

Radical Integrity begins with a simple practice: asking what is actually being treated as true, and whether it is.

So I've had to turn that lens on myself.

I've left systems before. I've stepped away from institutions, norms, and power structures that felt extractive, dehumanizing, or misaligned with my values. I know how to opt out. How to say no. How to choose smaller, quieter, more grounded ways of living and working.

Which makes this question uncomfortable: Why am I opting into this one?

AI is not a scrappy grassroots movement. It is deeply entangled with big tech, venture capital, geopolitical competition, environmental costs, and some of the most unequal concentrations of wealth and power we've seen. There is no pretending otherwise.

And yet here I am. Studying it, writing about it, using it, choosing to engage. So I had to stop and ask: what am I actually treating as true here? And is it?

What I found when I looked honestly

The first assumption I was treating as true: that staying clean is the same as doing good.

It isn't.

There's a seductive idea that refusing to participate is the most ethical choice. That disengagement equals innocence. I've wanted to believe that. But when I applied the Radical Integrity test — what is actually being treated as true, and is it? — that assumption didn't hold.

If the people who care about democracy, privacy, labor, creativity, and human dignity all walk away from shaping AI, who is left to do it?

Power abhors a vacuum. Refusing to understand how a system works doesn't weaken it. It just ensures that others — often those least concerned with its harms — define its direction.

The second assumption: that my discomfort is a signal to retreat.

It's not. It's a signal to pay attention.

You don't negotiate with tides. You don't shame currents into slowing down. You don't opt out of the weather. You learn. You observe. You respect the force at play. You decide how — and whether — you move within it.

Why this site

Radical Integrity is the name for something I've practiced a long time without having clean language for it: the discipline of examining what is actually being assumed before a decision gets made.

In my advisory work, I use it with leaders navigating AI adoption, acquisitions, and governance failures — the moments when something feels wrong but no one has language for it yet. The problem is almost never what it looks like on the surface. It's the assumption underneath. The thing everyone in the room is treating as settled that isn't.

This site is where I think out loud. Not a newsletter. Not a content strategy. A field journal — the kind you keep when you're in the middle of something you don't fully understand yet and you want to stay honest about that.

Writing about AI here is intentional. Grounding an abstract, global force in a specific, concrete way of thinking. Asking the same questions I ask about any powerful system:

What's actually going in, and what's coming out?
Who gets access?
Who bears the cost?
What is everyone in the room treating as true — and is it?

Staying with the discomfort

I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm not here to sell certainty.

What I know is this: I want to understand how these systems work — not to become complicit, but to become capable. Capable of asking better questions. Capable of spotting the assumption that will break things before it scales. Capable of helping others navigate.

That's what radical integrity asks of me. Not purity. Not performance. Presence, and honesty about what I find.

Welcome to the beginning. I'm glad you're here.

— Licia