Themes

Read enough of these essays and a small set of questions keeps resurfacing, dressed in different clothes each time. This page names them directly.

Who's actually deciding

Underneath the AI essays, the algorithm essays and the platform essays is one recurring question: when a judgment gets handed to a system, who is actually making the decision, and can anyone still see it, question it, or appeal it? On AI asks this of the assistant in your workflow; On algorithms asks it of the feed; On platforms asks it of the terms governing where you're allowed to stand.

What convenience quietly costs

A second thread runs through On attention, On AI and work and On technology and society: every friction removed was doing some kind of work — incubating a thought, building a skill, forcing a pause — and the cost of removing it rarely shows up on the same page as the benefit. None of these essays argue for friction as a virtue in itself; they argue for noticing when it's gone.

Power dressed as personalization

A third thread, most explicit in On privacy but present throughout, is that systems described as “personalized” or “optimized for you” are very often optimized for someone else's metric first, with your experience as a downstream effect rather than the actual target. Naming that gap — between who a system claims to serve and who it's actually built to serve — is close to the whole project of this site.

Skeptical, not cynical

The stance across all of it is meant to be skeptical rather than cynical: technology isn't destiny, and none of these essays argue for rejecting the tools. They argue for looking directly at the specific trade a specific tool is making, instead of accepting the framing — “it's just how it works” — that so often ships along with it. If a theme here pulls at you, its home essay has more; if you want the fuller shape of the project, see About, or start reading from the full collection.