Topic
ai
Writing topic
ai essays
A focused view of essays tagged ai. Use this page to find ideas and implementation patterns tied to this topic.
Read the full archive on The Crumple Zone
Use this filtered page for fast scanning, then open full essays for deeper implementation details.
Entries
61 from the on-site archive view
Use case
Quickly gather references for planning, audits, and executive briefings.
Writing
Latest matching essays
These are on-site abstracts only. Full essays open on The Crumple Zone.
Showing the latest 120 abstracts on-site (120 of 282). Browse the full archive on The Crumple Zone.
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?
Start here
Start with these 3 essays
Why “we care” substitutes for obligation—and how delay gets disguised as kindness.
~1 min read For history teams.
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…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
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…
~2 min read For philosophy teams.
Filtered essays
Why “we care” substitutes for obligation—and how delay gets disguised as kindness.
~1 min read For history teams.
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…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
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…
~2 min read For philosophy teams.
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…
~1 min read For politics teams.
Published
Optimizing the User
Resilience is a subsidy we pay to cover the cost of structural failure
~1 min read For history teams.
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…
~1 min read For history teams.
![Preview image for [Accept All] / [Reject All]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WciU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32ef620f-2a9d-4817-8fb9-eeb5ec6de040_1024x860.png)
Older essays (55)
Across healthcare, bureaucracy, and customer service, systems increasingly avoid decisions while appearing responsive. This essay argues that modern…
~1 min read For history teams.
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.
~1 min read For history teams.
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…
~2 min read For philosophy teams.
A guide to the difference between moral language and structural constraint
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Assume Maximum Awareness
Stop assuming leadership is ignorant. "Tragic Institutionalism" argues that institutional harm is priced in, and your burnout is the fuel.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
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…
~2 min read For history teams.
Published
Institutional Apoptosis
We build institutions for every crisis, then forget to give them an off-switch. This piece argues for “institutional apoptosis”: designing…
~2 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
The Capture of “Maintenance”
We must reclaim the maintenance that keeps people alive rather than the one that keeps systems standing.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
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…
~2 min read For history teams.
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…
~1 min read For history teams.
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…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
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…
~1 min read For history teams.
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…
~2 min read For history teams.
Published
Lucid Disorientation
AI's fluency removes the friction that keeps our heads on straight. On lucid disorientation, and rebuilding resistance to machines that never say no.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Engineering Mutuality
Critiquing the myth of self-sufficiency and outlining a new politics of shared dependence, where care, maintenance, and cooperation become the…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Variance ≠ Deviance
We have a deep-seated instinct to punish what doesn’t fit. Here's how data, management, and moral culture pathologize deviation.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Everyone is a Crumple Zone Now
Machines once bent to save people. Now people bend to save machines. A design essay on how digital systems reverse the ethics of safety, making…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Puncture the Cleanroom!
"Sterile control" makes systems fragile. Why reason must move from purity to porosity, embracing error, feedback, and accountability to survive.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
To Be is To Be Maintained
A new framework for understanding persistence. This essay redefines stability, arguing that justice is the allocation of repair and proving…
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Finitude As Love
Why embracing human limits can make our relationships, ethics, and systems more resilient. An essay on how dependence and maintenance define love,…
~1 min read For history teams.
“Charismatic systems” replace persuasion with smoothness. From social media to AI ethics dashboards, design now governs through affect. This essay…
~2 min read For history teams.
Published
Who Has the Right to Sound Kind?
The real danger isn't that AI is cold and inhuman; it's that it's becoming perfectly, fluently "kind." "Counterfeit tenderness" is a new form of…
~1 min read For history teams.
Empathy can’t scale, and conscience can’t keep up. This essay introduces Ethotechnics, a framework for embedding moral capacity directly into code,…
~2 min read For history teams.
Published
The In-House Ethicist
Before an institution can do immense harm, it must first learn to feel good about itself. It must learn to translate its contradictions into virtues…
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
The Pyrrhic Condition
Hospitals, platforms, universities, and economies all improve the metrics that define success while quietly eroding the conditions that make those…
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Stop Preaching. Start Engineering.
We’ve measured morality by character for too long. The Architecture of Goodness argues that ethics must be designed, not preached, replacing heroism…
~2 min read For history teams.
Published
Survival Isn't Proof of Worth
Longevity isn’t virtue. The systems that last the longest often do so by pushing their stress onto others. This is how survival turns into capture.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
The Right to Fuck Up
We replaced repair with disposal. It’s time to build a more human world.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Sanctiphagy (Virtue Extraction)
A good system shouldn’t need saints. It should metabolize harm before someone has to transcend it.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Stricter in Love Than in Law
Why do we grill our loved ones harder than corporations or governments? Stricter in Love Than in Law reveals how modern institutions turn excuses…
~2 min read For history teams.
“Be real” is the gospel of our age, chanted by politicians claiming to speak from the heart, influencers in “no-filter” confessionals, and…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Critical Bioengineering
From medical implants to insurance portals, from stress fractures to eviction notices, the physics of failure hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Consensus Without Conflict Is a Lie
In journalism, science, and law, we know that a single, smooth answer is dangerous. So why do we call it “best practice” when it comes from an…
~1 min read For corporations teams.
Published
When Explaining Makes Things Worse
We often use lengthy explanations after a mistake to manage our own discomfort. But true accountability requires concrete steps, not just eloquent…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Stop searching for an ethical AI CEO. The job is impossible. The problem isn't a lack of individual virtue, but a system that makes virtue a…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
How I Learned to Laugh at 'Inevitable'
The powerful have always used the language of weather and physics to enforce their will. The best counter isn't a better argument—it's seeing the…
~1 min read For history teams.
For more than a decade, we've treated misinformation as a problem of persuasion. Fact-checks, media literacy drives, AI detection tools all assume…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Anarchism is often described like a bonfire: a political philosophy of no institutions, no coordination, just a perpetual “no.” But the anarchist…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
In Praise of Fickleness
“Fickleness” is not always a moral failure; it’s fair to oscillate between incompatible demands.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Against Technocracy
Resisting rule by expertise is not anti-science or anti-technology; it is a defense of democracy
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
How to Smuggle an Idea
An idea can be banned without being outlawed; when the direct route is blocked by formal censorship or the chill of algorithmic disfavor, ideas…
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
So, are people actually getting dumber?
It’s quick, flattering, incomplete, and it puts the problem in human nature, not in the systems shaping people’s lives. But is it true?
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
"Evil" is Irrelevant
Israel took the word “evil,” ran it through a supply-chain dashboard, and executed it in Gaza.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Racism as a Business Model
How Denial Became a Revenue Stream—and What It Will Take to Break the Machine
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
In health insurance, credit, and employment, private actors mine ZIP codes, prescription histories, résumé gaps, and spending habits to assign risk…
~1 min read For politics teams.
Published
Say It Again Anyway
I nearly scrapped this draft because I’d already unpacked institutional forgetting in The Amnesia Engine. My inner editor—raised on Omit needless…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
To confront planetary crisis meaningfully, we must insist on refusal, accountability, and explicit, structural consent.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
The Amnesia Engine
How institutions metabolize critique, erase context, and make crisis their only teacher
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Seemingly Neutral Systems
Why neutrality isn’t fairness—and what it hides when institutions say it is.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
What The News Could Be
You open your phone to check the news; twenty minutes later you’re overstimulated and underinformed.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Refusability is the Future of Design
Why “No” Makes Every “Yes” More Real
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
How I Think About AGI
AI won’t rescue us from our own willingness to discard people—it just magnifies it.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Nobody is Too Expensive
Once you label entire groups “too expensive,” friction-based eugenics is always just one step away
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Or, Why We Can’t Debias Our Way Out of a System Built to Exclude
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Actuarial Medicine & Hidden Exclusion
How AI Helps Hospitals Quietly Filter Out Complex Patients and Call It “Efficiency”
~1 min read For politics teams.
Page 1
No essays match these filters yet. Try removing a filter to see more entries.