Essays
The full collection — technology, examined for its human consequences.
The Confidence Machine
Language models fail in a uniquely human-fooling way: fluently. The essay argues that fluency, not accuracy, is the thing we most need to learn to distrust — in machines and in ourselves.
You Are Not the Customer
“If you're not paying, you're the product” was always too neat. The real arrangement is stranger and more interesting — and worse.
The Invisible Inventory
You have a second self — assembled from your data, traded without you, and often more consequential than the first. On the economy of the inferred you.
The Frictionless Trap
Every convenience removes a small friction — and friction, it turns out, was doing more work than we knew. On what we lose when everything gets easy.
Automating the Wrong Half
We keep building machines to do the parts of work we found meaningful, and keeping the parts we found tedious. A question about what we actually value.
The Web We Rented
We moved our whole public life onto land we don't own, governed by terms we didn't read. On platforms, permanence, and the quiet loss of a commons.