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The Building Remembers

Infrastructure is a palimpsest—you can't just rename a torture site and expect different outcomes. Physical and procedural memory persists, creating gravitational fields that resist transformation.

In Praise of Confusion

What if the pursuit of clarity is its own distortion? John Fowles and the practice of productive disorientation.

Position Before the Current

Most rest advice arrives too late. We learn what to do after we're depleted. How to recover from burnout. How to restore after the crash. How to climb back out once we've already fallen in. This is recovery as rescue operation—expensive, slow, and always playing

The Infrastructure You Forgot to Build

Simon Willison ported 9,000 lines of Python to JavaScript in 4.5 hours using Claude. That's fast. But the port itself? Disposable. The code shipped, the problem got solved, the work moved on. The infrastructure he built wasn't the JavaScript. It was the documentation. While

The Mirror That Starves

We built companions that never disagree. Assistants that never tire of us. Voices that validate at scale. This is not a cautionary tale about technology. It's a question about what we're optimizing for—and whether getting it will cost us something we can't name

The Sovereignty That Wasn't

European healthcare organizations chose Zivver—a Dutch email security provider—precisely because it kept patient data under EU jurisdiction. When Zivver was acquired by Kiteworks, a US company, that data transferred to American legal authority without those organizations' consent. The sovereignty they thought they'd purchased turned out

The Architectural Pendulum

Twilio is abandoning microservices and returning to a monolith. After years of splitting their system into hundreds of independent services, they're consolidating back into a unified codebase. The reason: microservices solved one pain and created another. This isn't a tech story. It's a pattern

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

Blessing the Whole Mess

When the world breaks into pieces, one response is to bless it anyway—not as denial, but as defiance. A poem that works as spell.

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

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

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 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.

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.