Topic
corporations
Writing topic
corporations essays
A focused view of essays tagged corporations. Use this page to find ideas and implementation patterns tied to this topic.
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Latest matching essays
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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
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The interface is dying because the “User” is obsolete.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.
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.
![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 (52)
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
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.
When "okay" stops being a feeling and becomes a clearance code, care collapses into compliance. A new essay on "clearance culture" and the ethics of…
~1 min read For philosophy 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.
The moral geometry of measurement, and how to read the metrics that lie without lying.
~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
We need to need fewer heroes
When a society, an institution, or even a piece of software continually produces heroes, it offers clear evidence of a broken architecture.
~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
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.
Published
Career Ladders Are Just Filters
Feeling stuck or hollow in your career? This essay explains why the "career ladder" is a myth and a hidden "filter" rewards conformity over merit. A…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Terrain Over Character
Why the same harms keep recurring, no matter who is in charge.
~1 min read For history 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
Culture Used to Keep Us Alive
What we call “vibes” today are the sedatives left after centuries of cutting survival out of culture
~1 min read For history 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
"What I said came out wrong."
On Revision Privilege, a system that quietly distributes grace to the powerful while demanding finality from everyone else
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
"I ruin everything!"
Everywhere you look, people are proving how sorry they are through self-condemnation.
~1 min read For politics teams.
Published
The Stock Market Hates a Cure
Ten years ago, Gilead Sciences did what modern medicine says it exists to do: it cured a disease.
~1 min read For corporations teams.
Published
Why Doctors Say No to New Tech
It’s the diagnosis pulled out whenever a doctor or nurse pushes back on some new system, tool, or “transformation.” To outsiders, it sounds…
~1 min read For tech 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
Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Why Denial Is the Core of Structural Power
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Perverse Stability vs. Authentic Peace
We’ve grown so accustomed to equating silence with peace that we overlook the heavy toll it exacts.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Heartbroken and Devastated™
What happens when grief is routinized? When mourning scripts follow mass shootings, airstrikes, or police violence—but policy doesn’t move?
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Pretending Is Half the Job
You’re looped in once the decisions are made—asked to “help it land,” not to change it. You learn to turn harm into “alignment,” risk into “tone.”…
~2 min read For politics teams.
Published
When Early Detection is Deviance
Clarity that arrives before the group is ready gets coded as friction. And friction gets managed, not engaged with.
~1 min read For corporations teams.
Every hurricane season the ritual repeats: a governor steps to the mic, announces billions “secured on the capital markets,” and declares the state…
~1 min read For politics 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
What We Built, and Why We Let Go
In August 2024, we decided to end Andwise, with no formal press release, no dramatic pivot tweets—just a resolve to shut it down before becoming…
~1 min read For tech teams.
Published
Some pain will, of course, be there.
You arrive at the hospital from the airport, taking MARTA straight to Northside.
~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.
Published
ABA is a Capitalist's Wet Dream
When do "Standards of Care" tell us more about entrenchment than about efficacy?
~1 min read For autism teams.
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