In 2000, I finished an MA in fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University and did the next most logical thing. I built a software company.

The internet was new and exciting at that time, and I had a problem at my nonprofit marketing job that I knew the internet could solve. How do you connect people who care about the same causes and help them act together at scale? An online marketing for nonprofits pioneer named Mark Rovner served on a committee at my nonprofit’s national organisation and he invited me to present my ideas for solving this problem. The result was that I designed an online community platform called FedWeb that is still in use today by hundreds of Jewish Federations across North America.

While I was looking for an agency to build FedWeb, I met Laura Kittleman and Tom Yeatts who had already built out some very effective advocacy and community organising software through their company VirtualSprockets. They asked me to join them. I said yes. They taught me what it meant to be an entrepreneur and I was hooked.

In the summer of 2025, I was advising founders at a business accelerator in Vancouver on how to incorporate AI into their companies and products. I had thoughts about workflow and the categories of use that were likely to produce real returns versus the ones that were mostly theatre. What I did not have was a personal use case. I had founded and sold three technology for philanthropy companies before the AI era. I had used plenty of tools. But AI, for me, had remained something I recommended to others, but not yet folded into anything substantial of my own. I needed my own hands-on experience with AI to credibly advise founders through my consulting practice.

The experiment itself was not ambitious in the beginning. The original version of A Frictionless State was a screenplay I’d written at Tel Aviv University in 1996. I thought it would be interesting to ask an AI to convert it from screenplay format into prose fiction. I wanted to learn from the process. I really didn’t expect much from the output. Expectations met. It was my creation, but it had been put through a meat grinder.

There is a kind of reader who reads fiction not to have their existing judgments confirmed but to test them. Someone willing to stay inside moral complexity long enough to understand it, rather than resolving it quickly into a verdict. If you’ve read N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and felt unsettled for days, or read Frank Herbert’s Dune as a study in how power rolls and shifts, or read Octavia Butler’s Kindred and found it harder to be comfortable afterward—you’re probably the kind of reader I wrote this for. That’s not exclusion. It’s calibration.

A Frictionless State is a literary speculative novel, a genre that may not have its own section in your local bookstore, but names something genuine — fiction that uses an invented world to put pressure on questions the real one hasn’t resolved. That distance from real institutions and history lets readers examine what they actually think without the defensive shorthand that comes with familiarity. This novel explores what it means to do the most beneficial thing when beneficial and right are not the same.

I’d been having so much fun and frustration writing A Frictionless State, including many nights when I couldn’t stop writing in my head when I should have been sleeping. There was just one problem. I am an unknown novelist asking strangers to trust me with their time. How I addressed that challenge shaped everything about how I decided to publish. The traditional approach is:…

It began as a screenplay called Utopia that I wrote in 1996 while studying screenwriting at Tel Aviv University—plot-heavy and built for momentum. Action and then some more action, and a villain who explains their scheme to the hero just before the climactic, you guessed it, action.

For a student project, the screenplay was pretty creative. At the centre of it was a pandemic and a world governing system that maintained peace through economic constraints. It was thematically thin, but it explored the idea that a perfect world might not be perfect for everyone.

The COVID-19 pandemic had been running for about a year when I pulled Utopia out again. I hadn’t thought about it in a while—not seriously. I’d returned to it a few times over the intervening years, read through it, felt a connection to that time in my life when I wrote it, and set it down again. I had other priorities.