Echoes in the Current

The Undercurrent

The idea for Echoes in the Current came to me on a boat off the coast of Mexico. I was staring at the horizon, trying to steady myself against the rising swell, when the first scene surfaced. For a few quiet minutes, it felt like I could hear something beneath the water, like a signal reaching for me. The first verse of the prologue came to me then, but I only started writing the book after I left Unruly in 2013.

At the time, I couldn’t fully articulate what was bothering me. I just knew something felt off. I’d been part of building something fast, exciting, and high-growth. But underneath the velocity, something important was eroding as we scaled: connection, context, meaning.

Then I came across Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. I don’t know why I picked it up, much less finished reading it. It was dense, philosophical, and devastating in its insight. The book argues that our society has become dominated by the “emissary,” the left brain’s drive for categorization, control, and abstraction, at the expense of the “master,” the right brain’s sense of wholeness, empathy, and interconnectedness. That imbalance, it suggested, was the root of many of our modern crises.

I didn’t really have a premise until I watched Communicating Doors, a play about a time-traveling dominatrix, just after reading Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds. Suddenly, the unease I’d been carrying finally made sense. I didn’t have a novel yet, but what I had were questions, and a nagging feeling that we can’t just be here to increase shareholder value. I started looking at the small things. Things we take for granted, until they alter the course of our lives. How those choices can change the world.

While studying digital transformation at MIT, those questions grew sharper. We were designing systems, learning to map processes and optimize for scale. But I kept circling back to a deeper question: what if the true danger isn’t that machines become too much like us, but that we’ve never really reckoned with what we are?

Perhaps that’s why the oldest directive to "know thyself” still lingers. Not as a command to master, but as a call to humility. To look inward not for certainty, but for the contours of our own contradictions. Because until we reckon with what remains hidden in us—our exclusions, evasions, and complicit silences—we will keep encoding systems that mirror our partial selves. Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, cannot transcend what we refuse to acknowledge. And what we do not confront, we will repeat. And this time, at scale.

Then, on October 26, 2018, I read a Business Insider article reporting that Microsoft was ready to sell the Pentagon “all the AI it needs.” Something about that phrasing, so casual, so transactional, utterly indifferent to consequence, hit me hard. I couldn’t sleep that night. Instead, I painted a piece called SOS in Binary. It was instinctive. Urgent. A protest in ink and code. I didn’t know then that it would become the cover for this book. I just knew I needed to make something that didn’t look away.

That’s when Echoes began to take real shape. It had been coagulating for years. Stitched together from essays, late-night questions, philosophical rabbit holes, and moments that didn’t quite add up.

The story unfolds in a distant future where Earth has already collapsed, not through a single catastrophic event, but a slow drift of performance over principles, metrics over meaning.

The mechanics are real. It just happens to read like sci-fi. I’ve seen versions of that moment in boardrooms. The right person in the room, the right insight on the edge of being voiced… and then, silence.

What fascinates me isn’t the tech. It’s the human pattern.

• Who gets erased, and why?

• What gets optimized, and at what cost?

• When do systems collapse in ways we only see in hindsight?

I’ve worked in global digital strategy across L’Oréal, Google, and Publicis. I’ve built frameworks, led transformations, and driven results. But the ideas in Echoes refused to stay confined to slide decks. Too human. Too emotionally raw. Too complex to reduce to slides. They kept showing up in the margins of every brief.

So I turned to fiction, and found in it a sandbox big enough to hold them.

Echoes in the Current became the space where I could pressure-test questions no one was asking aloud about AI ethics, collapse, resistance, and the emotional cost of seeing clearly in systems that reward compliance. It taught me how to think across timelines. How to balance velocity with consequence. How to design not just for reach, but to build for resilience. The process of writing it reshaped how I approach leadership, with more patience for nuance, more clarity in uncertainty, and a stronger refusal to default to easy answers.

Just as that Business Insider article prompted me to paint what became this book’s cover art, it was a Business Insider dinner that led me to meet Joshua Lowcock in March. It felt like kismet, or in Malay, maktub. Through our conversations, many of the ideas sharpened. He helped me turn instinct into articulation and walked me through self-publishing, something I hadn’t even considered.

This book gave me new language for old truths. A new framework through which to lead, build and advise. Because sometimes, the clearest truth doesn’t show up in a KPI, a dashboard, or a quarterly report. Sometimes it lives between the lines, suspended like meaning in superposition.

And maybe, if we’re lucky, a small signal still has time to be heard.

Maybe what I can’t say, I can write… and let the current carry the echoes to whoever is meant to hear them.