History essays

Incidence Is Not Suffering

• economics

"We Condemn the Excesses"

“We condemn the excesses” isn’t an apology, it’s a tactic. From Amritsar 1919 to Minneapolis 2026, how governments use…

• Care theater

Don’t Let Reassurance Do Engineering's Job

Why “we care” substitutes for obligation—and how delay gets disguised as kindness.

• Care theater

Optimizing the User

Resilience is a subsidy we pay to cover the cost of structural failure

• Burden

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The interface is dying because the “User” is obsolete.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…

• ai

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

• Delay

Pending: The political economy of waiting

The loading screen is the most powerful weapon in the modern state

• Delay

The Worldview with a Gun

No single ontology—vendor or otherwise—should monopolize state violence.

• Infrastructural power

Temporal Capture: The Arbitrage of Human Duration

• Delay

The Death of Slack

It appears we have successfully eliminated the margin for error. That's terrifying.

• ai

You Can Design Harm Out

How to design systems that protect human limits and reject harm as the path of least resistance

• Reversibility

The Cowardice of Inference

Predictive modeling is always an exercise of political power.

• ai

The American Ergonomic Ideal

• history

Abolishing The Classics and Cultural Imperialism

Understanding why Classics departments got funded helps us clarify their irredeemability

• culture

The Elite Capture of the Sciences

Reclaiming Knowledge for the Common Good

• history