On technology and society

The most consequential decisions technology makes aren't the dramatic ones. They're the thousands of small, invisible defaults that quietly decide who gets seen, believed, and served.

The slow vote

Software makes civic-scale decisions constantly — whose post gets amplified, whose face an algorithm recognizes reliably, whose neighborhood gets the faster delivery route — without ever standing for election or publishing its reasoning. Individually these look like product decisions. Collectively they function like policy, shaping who gets access, visibility and convenience at a scale that outstrips most actual civic institutions. A society that lets private, unaccountable systems make that many public-feeling decisions has quietly outsourced a form of governance without ever voting on it.

The frictionless trap

Every convenience removes a small friction, and friction, it turns out, was doing more work than we knew — it was where deliberation happened, where a person had a moment to reconsider, where a community had to negotiate rather than simply default. Remove enough friction and you don't just save time; you remove the pauses where judgment used to live. A frictionless society is not automatically a better one; it's one optimized for throughput, at some cost to reflection that's easy to miss because the cost never shows up as a line item.

Convenience has a civic price

Individually, choosing the convenient option is almost always rational. Collectively, a society built entirely from individually rational conveniences can end up somewhere nobody chose — a public square that's really a handful of private platforms, a labor market shaped by systems no worker consented to, a discourse optimized for engagement rather than understanding. None of this requires villains; it's what happens when a lot of reasonable individual choices aggregate without anyone accountable for the sum. The mechanism doing the aggregating in the discourse specifically is On attention; the version of it happening inside a job is On AI and work; the version happening to the public commons itself is On platforms.

What a healthier relationship looks like

None of these essays argue for rejecting technology — that ship has sailed and, mostly, shouldn't un-sail. The more useful stance is a kind of active custodianship: naming the trade-offs a convenience quietly makes, protecting the friction that was doing real work, and treating “it's just how the platform works” as the beginning of a question rather than the end of one. Technology isn't destiny; it's a series of specific, revisable choices, made by specific people, that a society is allowed to argue with.