The Week They Called In Sick
Every institution measures whether the work got done. Almost none measures who had to be there for it to.
Theme
Economics essays
1 refinement active
Incidence Is Not Suffering
Don’t Let Reassurance Do Engineering's Job
Why “we care” substitutes for obligation—and how delay gets disguised as kindness.
If Every User Is a Potential Threat...
People are not becoming inherently dishonest, lazy, or cynical. They are becoming game-theoretically optimal for the en…
You Don’t Have the Right
In this Age of Appeals, you have the paper right. And a stamina test.
Optimizing the User
Resilience is a subsidy we pay to cover the cost of structural failure
The Post-User Web
The interface is dying because the “User” is obsolete. On the post-user web, AI agents, friction economics, and the ris…
We're On It! The Age of Abundant Acknowledgement
Why being in process so often leads nowhere: Legitimacy engineering and “care signals” as governance tech
Pending: The political economy of waiting
The loading screen is the most powerful weapon in the modern state
Credibility/standing as an access-control system
Assume Maximum Awareness
The Worldview with a Gun
No single ontology—vendor or otherwise—should monopolize state violence.
Institutional Apoptosis
Designing systems that know when to end
The Capture of “Maintenance”
Reclaiming the maintenance that keeps people alive rather than the one that keeps systems standing.
Temporal Capture: The Arbitrage of Human Duration
The Death of Slack
It appears we have successfully eliminated the margin for error. That's terrifying.
Governance by Caricature
You Can Design Harm Out
How to design systems that protect human limits and reject harm as the path of least resistance
The Cowardice of Inference
Predictive modeling is always an exercise of political power.
The Pyrrhic Condition
Hospitals, platforms, universities, and economies all improve the metrics that define success while quietly eroding the…
Career Ladders Are Just Filters
The Stock Market Hates a Cure
Ten years ago, Gilead Sciences did what modern medicine says it exists to do: it cured a disease.
Beyond Deservingness
Racism as a Business Model
How Denial Became a Revenue Stream—and What It Will Take to Break the Machine
Flexible Reciprocity: Why Fairness Isn’t 50/50
What I Hope Happens to You
I don’t want you to just avoid burnout, I want you to see labor as a site of struggle, defaults as political choices, a…
Frictionless for Whom?
Seamlessness isn’t neutral. It’s subsidized, by someone else’s time, attention, and emotional capacity.
Catastrophe Bonds: How Wall Street Prices Our Disasters
Is Honesty an Expensive Hobby?
When does cunning becomes a strategic choice? Or, why are shitty people so wealthy?
Abundance Is Not a Future, It Is a Forbidden Present
Gatekeeping is what blocks care, not scarcity.
ABA is a Capitalist's Wet Dream
When do "Standards of Care" tell us more about entrenchment than about efficacy?
Misreading Capitalist Realism
Fisher’s emphasis on capitalism’s complexity and adaptability can be—and often is—misread.
The Subtext Economy Has Collapsed: Exposure is Not Enough
If everyone already knows the emperor is naked, there’s no point yelling about his clothes.
Collapse Capitalism: The Structural Integration of Crisis
Sprawling in the Age of Compression
On Ecosystems of Care and Regeneration that Grow in the Cracks
10 Lessons from 2024: Following the Cracks
Temporal Solidarity
On Universal Crip Time and Non-Capitalist Productivity
The Post-Attention Economy: A More Insidious Form of Value Creation
The Work Ahead of Us Is No Bigger Than Before
Disaffection is a Raw Material
Routes and patterns
Reading paths
Concept maps
Where the same pressure keeps reappearing
More entry points
Question-led archive pages
Focused pages that stay close to specific recurring pressures.
Continue reading
Related context
Version history
No prior versions in this archive snapshot.
Expand a version to view revision details.
Get new essays by email
An occasional note when a new essay goes live.
No spam, no shared list, unsubscribe any time.
Get new essays by email
An occasional note when a new essay goes live.
No spam, no shared list, unsubscribe any time.