Essays
The full collection — technology, examined for its human consequences.
The essays are gathered here in one list, and also sorted by theme into a set of hub pages — On AI, On privacy, On attention, On algorithms, On AI and work, On platforms, and On technology and society. If a title below intrigues you, its theme page has more in the same vein; if you want the argument that ties all of them together, that's Themes.
The essays
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.
The Sorting Hand
A recommendation system is a thousand small decisions about what you should see next, made by no one in particular. On authorship without an author — see On algorithms.
The Second Employer
When the tool you use to do your job also measures, ranks and schedules you, who's really managing whom? See On AI and work.
The Landlord's Terms
Every open platform seems to close eventually, and every closed one insists it's for your protection. On the long arc from open protocol to walled garden — see On platforms.
The Slow Vote
Software makes thousands of small civic decisions — who gets seen, what counts as credible, whose time is worth protecting — without ever standing for election. See On technology and society.
Legible to the Machine, Illegible to Us
Systems increasingly optimize for signals only they can see, in a language only they fully speak. On the growing gap between what a system optimizes and what a person can inspect.
The Skill You Didn't Know You Were Losing
Every tool that removes an effort also atrophies a muscle. A cautious essay about which muscles are worth keeping on purpose.
Reading in order, or not
None of this requires a reading order. The AI essays and the work essays talk to each other; the attention essays and the algorithm essays are really one argument split in two; the privacy and platform essays both end up asking the same question about power. Pick whichever door looks interesting — they all lead to the same house. New pieces are announced, when there's one worth announcing, through the newsletter.