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Showing 35 of 35 archive essays. You’re at the end of this result set.

Uninhabitable Acts
March 17, 2026newsletter
- Survivability
Don’t Let Reassurance Do Engineering's Job
January 22, 2026newsletter
Why “we care” substitutes for obligation—and how delay gets disguised as kindness.
- Care theater
If Every User Is a Potential Threat...
January 20, 2026newsletter
People are not becoming inherently dishonest, lazy, or cynical. They are becoming game-theoretically optimal for the en…
- ai
You Don’t Have the Right
January 15, 2026newsletter
In this Age of Appeals, you have the paper right. And a stamina test.
- Survivability
How to Design for Cognitive Scarcity
January 14, 2026newsletter
Stop designing for the idealized “Hero User.” Build resilient interfaces that work when your user is stressed, tired, a…
- ai
Optimizing the User
January 11, 2026newsletter
Resilience is a subsidy we pay to cover the cost of structural failure
- Burden
The Post-User Web
January 8, 2026newsletter
The interface is dying because the “User” is obsolete. On the post-user web, AI agents, friction economics, and the ris…
- ai
We're On It! The Age of Abundant Acknowledgement
January 7, 2026newsletter
Why being in process so often leads nowhere: Legitimacy engineering and “care signals” as governance tech
- Delay
Pending: The political economy of waiting
December 30, 2025newsletter
The loading screen is the most powerful weapon in the modern state
- Delay
Credibility/standing as an access-control system
December 28, 2025newsletter
- ai
Toothless Ethics: Why Principles Don’t Stop Machines
December 17, 2025newsletter
A guide to the difference between moral language and structural constraint
- Care theater
Assume Maximum Awareness
December 10, 2025newsletter
- ai
The Worldview with a Gun
December 6, 2025newsletter
No single ontology—vendor or otherwise—should monopolize state violence.
- Infrastructural power
Institutional Apoptosis
November 29, 2025newsletter
Designing systems that know when to end
- Reversibility
The Capture of “Maintenance”
November 25, 2025newsletter
Reclaiming the maintenance that keeps people alive rather than the one that keeps systems standing.
- Burden
Temporal Capture: The Arbitrage of Human Duration
November 24, 2025newsletter
- Delay
The Death of Slack
November 20, 2025newsletter
It appears we have successfully eliminated the margin for error. That's terrifying.
- ai
Governance by Caricature
November 18, 2025newsletter
- ai
You Can Design Harm Out
November 14, 2025newsletter
How to design systems that protect human limits and reject harm as the path of least resistance
- Reversibility
The Cowardice of Inference
November 14, 2025newsletter
Predictive modeling is always an exercise of political power.
- ai
Lucid Disorientation
November 11, 2025newsletter
How to not lose it when your tools never say no
- ai
Vibe-Based Legitimacy (Charismatic Systems)
October 27, 2025newsletter
From algorithmic empathy to moral branding: the hidden politics of charisma in AI.
- ai
Who Has the Right to Sound Kind?
October 26, 2025newsletter
The real danger isn't that AI is cold and inhuman; it's that it's becoming perfectly, fluently "kind." "Counterfeit ten…
- Care theater
Consensus Without Conflict Is a Lie
September 21, 2025newsletter
In journalism, science, and law, we know that a single, smooth answer is dangerous. So why do we call it “best practice…
- ai
The Ethical AI CEO Is a Contradiction by Design
September 13, 2025newsletter
Stop searching for an ethical AI CEO. The job is impossible. The problem isn't a lack of individual virtue, but a syste…
- ai
Long On Exclusion: How Investors, Institutions, and the State Keep the Margin Open
June 21, 2025newsletter
From 1493 papal decrees to 2025 AI eviction pilots, and the single profit logic that sustains them.
- ai
How I Think About AGI
March 27, 2025newsletter
AI won’t rescue us from our own willingness to discard people—it just magnifies it.
- ai
Is "Ethical AI" Just Budget Cuts in a Sweater Vest?
March 21, 2025newsletter
Or, Why We Can’t Debias Our Way Out of a System Built to Exclude
- ai
Algorithmic Austerity: How AI facilitates the Financialization of Medicine
February 13, 2025newsletter
- ai
Coercion as Fragility
November 25, 2024newsletter
Rethinking Control in AI Systems
- ai
Could AI Explainability Reinforce Existing Power Structures?
October 30, 2024newsletter
- ai
The Commodification of Behavior in the Age of AI
October 5, 2024newsletter
Exploring one of the most ethically complex and socially impactful issues of our time, beyond surface-level data owners…
- ai
How the 2024 Election Will Be Won
September 28, 2024newsletter
AI-Driven Time-Series Modeling Will Reshape Political Campaigns
- ai
Existential Risk from AI is Ethnographic, Not Speculative
August 27, 2024newsletter
The most pressing dangers of AI are not confined to some future cataclysm; they are here now, embedded in the systems t…
- ai
Healthcare's AI Dilemma: Why America's Tech Falls Flat
August 9, 2024newsletter
nobody wants our money-mangled clinical decision support systems
- ai

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