Julian Thorne
Essays about technology and the people it's quietly rearranging — AI, privacy, attention, and the strange bargain of the modern web. Skeptical, but not cynical.
I write essays about technology for people who use it but don't build it — trying to explain not just how the machines work, but what they're doing to us while we're not looking. Clear, honest, and allergic to hype in both directions.
The essays keep returning to the same handful of questions in different clothes: who benefits when a system is designed a certain way, what gets quietly automated versus preserved, and what we lose in exchange for what we gain. If you're new here, Themes lays out the throughlines directly; otherwise, just start wherever the title catches you.
Start here
Essays
The full collection.
On AI
Past the hype and the doom.
On privacy
The invisible economy of you.
On attention
The web's real product.
About
Who's writing, and why.
Newsletter
An essay when there's one worth sending.
More by theme
On algorithms
The sorting hand behind the feed.
On AI and work
What we choose to automate, and why.
On platforms
Open versus closed, and who decides.
On technology and society
The slow civic costs of convenience.
Themes
The ideas underneath the essays.
Reading list
The kind of reading behind the work.
FAQ
Quick answers about the site.
Recent essays
The Confidence Machine
Why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't that it's wrong, but that it's wrong in exactly the tone of someone who's right.
You Are Not the Customer
The oldest rule of the free web, re-examined for the algorithmic age — and what it costs to forget it.
The Sorting Hand
Every feed is a judgment dressed up as a mirror. On the quiet authorship of the timeline — see On algorithms.
The Second Employer
What happens when the software you use to do your job starts deciding how the job gets done — see On AI and work.