Guides

Start · 2 guides

Understand the idea

The core claim, the patterns to watch for, and the tests to carry.

The four defenses What the archive argues against, in order: hide the cost, misplace it, justify it, defer it. The claims behind each, the essays that answer them, and the answer run in reverse.

Apply · 12 guides

The same framework worked through one field at a time.

Healthcare Spotting burden transfer, delay, proof demands, and care theater in clinical and administrative settings.
Work and organizations Hidden maintenance, coercive flexibility, and institutional smoothness bought with what workers absorb.
AI systems Ambient governance, hidden politics in technical defaults, and the costs pushed onto users and downstream workers.
Education Institutional sorting, managed inclusion, and the burdens students and teachers absorb to keep schools legible.
Disability and mental health Where refusal, withdrawal, and uneven access get misdescribed as individual dysfunction instead of design.
Product and UX Testing usable recourse under stress instead of counting feature presence.
Law and administrative process Rights on paper against rights in use: what a person must survive to exercise a procedure.
Social services Attrition as governance: how eligibility, proof, and waiting decide who gives up before help arrives.
Politics and democracy Open on paper against actually responsive: who can be heard, and whether being heard changes anything.
Media and discourse Journalism, research, and commentary: avoiding misdescription by using categories more carefully.
AI governance Oversight for show against recourse people can enforce: whether anyone can make a system’s error count.

Reference · 3 guides

The longer arguments, the method, and the maps between them.

Framework diagrams 19 diagrams of the mechanisms the essays name, grouped by who bears the burden, who can change the arrangement, and what an institution was entitled to decide.
The Research Program How institutions and technologies push work onto people and absorb their failures through them, and whether they stay livable for the people who depend on them.

I work in healthcare AI, and some of that work is paid for by the kinds of institutions these essays criticize. Who pays for this work.