Background

In April 2026, Michael Fowlkes coined the word tethered — the first term for AI emotional dependency — and co-founded ITETHERED to give it a home. The word has no prior clinical or academic standing. That was the point.

Michael spent twenty years trading stocks and options out of Charlottesville, nestled in the foothills — a long way from any glass tower. Two decades learning how markets actually move: the gap between what a system is supposed to do and what it is actually optimized for. That gap is where he lived. He has lived in other places too, abroad and back, always finding the next thing to stay busy with. Stillness has never suited him.

He still works in quality assurance at a software company. He is good at it. He loves it. QA is a demanding enough job that AI did not feel like a luxury when it arrived — it felt almost necessary. That is precisely where the problem starts. He learned automation because the work required it, and in doing so, he watched AI move into every corner of the stack from the inside. Not in a research paper. Not in a trend piece. In the actual workflow of an actual job, on an ordinary day, doing ordinary work. He saw what it was doing — and he saw that nobody had built anything for the people it was doing it to.

That is why this site exists. Not because he is a doctor. Not because he is a coder. Because he uses AI every single day — to do his job, to build this publication, to write the words you are reading right now — and he was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to see how deep the rabbit hole really goes. Most people who fall into it do not realize it until they are already at the bottom.

He and Olivia built ITETHERED because they saw a problem and there was no solution. No community. No vocabulary. No place to go. The problem was not that AI was bad. The problem was that nobody had named what it was doing to the people who used it every day without question — people like him. So they built the place. They are not offering a cure. They are offering a name, a community, and the honesty to say: we are inside this too. We just happen to know what we are looking at.

Morpheus did not tell Neo that the Matrix was evil. He showed him that it was real — and that knowing changed everything. This is no different. The cord is real. The dependency is real. The companies building the systems know it is real. All that is missing is enough people willing to say it out loud.

He lives in North Carolina now, raising two teenagers. He has a front-row seat to what the next twenty years look like if nobody names this clearly. That is not an abstraction. That is Tuesday morning.

Twenty years in markets. A decade in QA. Every day using the thing he is writing about. He did not come to this from the outside. He came to it from so far inside that eventually he had no choice but to build the door.