What Happens to the Web When AI Agents Do the Clicking
Amazon's cancellation maze worked because people get tired.
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Media essays
Writing on the internet, journalism, narrative power, platforms, and how one manufactured version of public meaning hardens into fact. 19 essays in this theme.
Writing on the internet, journalism, narrative power, platforms, and how one manufactured version of public meaning hardens into fact.
19 essays · the pattern that runs through most of them is Infrastructural power
Start with You Can Hit Every Target and Lose the Point
You Can Hit Every Target and Lose the Point
Hospitals, platforms, universities, and economies all improve the metrics that define success while quietly eroding the conditions that make those metrics meaningful.
Consensus Without Conflict Is a Lie
In journalism, science, and law, we know that a single, smooth answer is dangerous.
Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Euphemism moves the blame onto “the process” and makes people doubt what they saw.
Heartbroken and Devastated™
What happens when grief is routinized?
The News Is Paid to Keep You Anxious
Five drills for newsrooms.
Stop Blaming Dopamine
Whose business model made the scroll feel like a willpower failure?
Feeds Now Shape Belief, Not Just Attention
Repetition, vague terms and ranking now move belief more than outrage does, often before anyone notices.
Digital Stims That Adjust to Your Nervous System
A silicone popper gives the same feedback all day.
Radical Ideas Need an Island Before a Bridge
Ta-Nehisi Coates worked out his critique of Zionism out of public view, then carried it to a mass audience.
Why Alternative Media Depends on What It Criticizes
Nonprofit newsrooms and crowdfunded outlets reassure affluent readers with incremental reform while staying tied to the donors and platforms that fund them.
Consent Has to Be Kept, Not Just Given
In love, work and friendship, a yes given once can turn into pressure to keep saying yes.
Israel's Co-Option of Women's Narratives
The state uses women’s suffering to justify war and their peace work to cover for it
Giving Someone the Mic Isn't Giving Them Power
Invite an Indigenous speaker onto a panel to “speak truth to power,” and being watched on that platform changes what they can say.
What a Fake Memo From the Future Can Do
An HR memo about office panic after the seas rise two feet, dated 2038, gives a reader five seconds of believing it.
Writing for People Born Without Autism
On the page, nobody can hear you joking. A joke built from the argument's own logic needs no tone to land.
Movies I Want to See: Reimagining the South Asian Diaspora on Screen
We Are Lady Parts and Monkey Man are scratching the surface of the work we need to do
AI's Catastrophic Risk Is Already in the Welfare Office
The apocalypse debate looks at the horizon.
How Indian American Careerism Hid My Autism
Caste, immigration law and family expectations taught me to hide my neurodivergence, and the masking cost years of mental health.
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