Topics
Safety architecture, neurodivergence, governance mechanics, and usable safeguards.
Writing
Writing & essays
The theoretical engine behind my safety and governance practice. On-site abstracts only; full essays live on The Crumple Zone.
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New essays land there first before they make it into the highlights below.
Format
Concise essays and audits written for practitioners, policymakers, and founders.
Cadence
New work lands monthly with field notes added as systems evolve.
Writing
Latest essays
These are on-site abstracts only. The full archive lives on The Crumple Zone with essays and field notes.
Reading guide (optional)
These essays read like postmortems: what systems do under stress, where failure lands, and who carries the repair cost.
They track procedure as allocation—time, composure, documentation, persistence—not just money.
Expect operational facts over moral positioning: clocks, escalation paths, reversibility, ownership, and closure records.
When something goes wrong, who is forced to carry the cost—and how long can the system remain wrong without consequence?
Featured
Start here if you want a quick orientation before diving into the full archive.
Published
"We Condemn the Excesses"
"We condemn the excesses" isn’t an apology, it’s a tactic. From Amritsar 1919 to Minneapolis 2026, discover how governments use condemnation to protect their power, delay accountability, and ensure the system survives its own violence.
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Published
"We Condemn the Excesses"
"We condemn the excesses" isn’t an apology, it’s a tactic. From Amritsar 1919 to Minneapolis 2026, discover how governments use condemnation to protect their power, delay accountability, and ensure the system survives its own violence.
Why “we care” substitutes for obligation—and how delay gets disguised as kindness.
Published
If Every User Is a Potential Threat...
People are not becoming inherently dishonest, lazy, or cynical. They are becoming game-theoretically optimal for the environment they have been placed in.
Published
You Don’t Have the Right
We are living through a divergence between rights and remedies. If a system is "95% accurate" but concentrates errors on the vulnerable, fairness metrics are irrelevant. Here is a better way to measure justice.
Published
How to Design for Cognitive Scarcity
Stop designing for the idealized "Hero User." Learn how to build resilient interfaces that work when your user is stressed, tired, and operating on 15% battery.
Published
Optimizing the User
Resilience is a subsidy we pay to cover the cost of structural failure
Published
The Post-User Web
The interface is dying because the “User” is obsolete. On the post-user web, AI agents, friction economics, and the rise of adversarial infrastructure.
Across healthcare, bureaucracy, and customer service, systems increasingly avoid decisions while appearing responsive. This essay argues that modern governance operates by distributing exhaustion rather than delivering outcomes.
The loading screen is a weapon. "Pending" is a governing strategy of attrition designed to make you carry the weight of the process until you give up.
Older essays (11)
We keep describing our institutional crisis as one of 'belief' or 'truth.' But in practice, the bottleneck is 'standing.' An essay on why 'we hear you' is a trap, and how to distinguish between providing input and triggering obligation."
A guide to the difference between moral language and structural constraint
Published
Assume Maximum Awareness
Stop assuming leadership is ignorant. "Tragic Institutionalism" argues that institutional harm is priced in, and your burnout is the fuel.
Published
The Worldview with a Gun
From Chicago to Gaza, AI is turning "threat scores" into self-fulfilling prophecies. A critique of epistemic laundering and the automation of state violence. AI systems like Palantir and Axon don't just predict risk, they manufacture…
Published
Institutional Apoptosis
We build institutions for every crisis, then forget to give them an off-switch. This piece argues for “institutional apoptosis”: designing governments, programs, and platforms that know how to die before they devour the people inside them.
Published
The Capture of “Maintenance”
We must reclaim the maintenance that keeps people alive rather than the one that keeps systems standing.
A theory of Primitive Accumulation applied to time. Just as capitalism once enclosed land to create value where there was none, it is now enclosing intervals (waiting, boredom, sleep) to capitalize assets that were previously outside the…
Published
The Death of Slack
Modern efficiency hasn't solved volatility; it has just offloaded it onto you. An analysis of how the removal of buffers, inventory, and downtime created a brittle world where every mistake is a crisis.
Published
Governance by Caricature
Exploring how modern systems are built around an imaginary “reasonable” user, blaming real people for design failure and arguing for infrastructures that accommodate messy, complex human lives.
Published
You Can Design Harm Out
Explore how system architecture, not intent, makes harm the path of least resistance in institutions. Learn why brittleness and structural fragility offload damage onto vulnerable humans.
Published
The Cowardice of Inference
Predictive systems don't "find patterns," they establish rules about who gets access, who faces scrutiny, whose harm matters less. Their builders claim neutrality while governing lives. It's time to name it and accept accountability.
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