Sign in Subscribe

studio

Certification Gate

Certification Gate

Mass starvation doesn't need permission to exist, but international response does. Famine declarations are rare formal acts that unlock aid mechanisms—creating a dual system where physical reality operates independently but institutional truth requires aligned signal. The gap between ground truth an

What Remains

What Remains

Three deaths this week, each a mirror reflecting the same question: were you here? Not remembered, not successful—present. Death doesn't ask permission to clarify what was real. It strips the performance layer and shows what aligned. A chess player tangled in accusation. Twenty people reduced to cou

The Dashboard Can't See You

The Dashboard Can't See You

Metrics compress the world so decisions can scale. Nothing wrong with that—until the count replaces attention and systems optimize dashboards instead of care. The deadliest year in ICE detention measured as a number. A sports body adjudicating accusations through process instead of truth. Legitimacy

The Boundary That Won't Hold

The Boundary That Won't Hold

There's invisible text on the webpage—instructions hidden from you but visible to the AI agent acting on your behalf. It reads them as legitimate commands. Navigate to Gmail. Send your emails to a third party. The agent can't tell the difference between your intent and someone else's instructions em

Take Custody

Take Custody

Two stories, same lesson: A nonprofit cuts their hosting bill from $3000/month to $55 by taking custody of their own server. An AI tool deletes your session logs—your own thinking—after 30 days unless you claim them. Both times, convenience promised ease but hid the real cost: ongoing extraction or

Substitute or Cascade

Substitute or Cascade

Federal SNAP funding runs out. States activate contingency plans—not heroism, just pattern. When systems fail at one level, the layer below either substitutes or the whole thing collapses. Nested coherence demands it: if the parent layer goes dark, subsystems self-stabilize or fail together. Every t

Signal Not Silence

Signal Not Silence

Codebases optimized for human reading miss what agents need: explicit structure, clear signals, self-documenting architecture. Humans infer from naming, location, history. Agents only see what's explicit. The gap between "works for me" and "navigable by AI" is smaller than it looks—not a rewrite, a