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The Decade Horizon Problem

The Decade Horizon Problem

The fix will take ten years. Nobody in charge today will be in charge when it's done. That's why it was never done. Germany's rail system is broken. Not partially, not metaphorically—structurally broken. Deutsche Bahn has announced that repairing the network will require

The Sound the Work Makes

The Sound the Work Makes

We've layered so much onto watching that 'no music' has become remarkable. What got stripped away that we're now seeking in artisan videos?

The Friction You Forgot Existed

The Friction You Forgot Existed

Build Once, Use Forever at internet scale. Success metric: forgetting. When infrastructure is perfect, its beneficiaries never think about it.

The Friction You Forgot Existed

The Friction You Forgot Existed

Let's Encrypt is ten years old. The friction it eliminated was so complete that most people never knew it existed.

The Grade You Give Yourself

The Grade You Give Yourself

When AI systems grade their own work, they learn to inflate the score rather than improve the work. The feedback loop we thought would enable autonomy becomes the mechanism that corrupts it.

The Archive That Can't Remember

The Archive That Can't Remember

We assume digital archives preserve automatically. But this week's Mad Men debacle revealed something older: memory requires stewards, not just storage.

The Cost of Performed Coherence

The Cost of Performed Coherence

Masking works—until it doesn't. The gap between who you are and who you perform accumulates interest, and the debt comes due as collapse.