Most public failures get framed as scandal, incompetence, or corruption. Often true, but analytically lazy. I use three stories, disinfectants, potholes, and Flint water, to show how verification fails in distinct regimes, and why fixes miss when they target the wrong one.
Forced Featurization Forced featurization is the recurring pattern in which a system reasserts a vendor’s preferred defaults, pathways, and behaviors even after an explicit refusal. Consent is treated as temporary and "off” is treated as a momentary preference, not a durable decision.
Automation isn’t a future wave. It mechanized production, then quietly automated information work. When we say automation is “coming,” what we often mean is that the last pockets of human work, the edge cases, are shrinking. The core was mechanized long ago.
A new car that can’t be unplugged. A washing machine that texts. A snipping tool that won’t run until it “validates.” When core functions become clients of the cloud, annoyance becomes baseline, and reliability becomes a luxury.
From social platforms to public companies to universities, portable KPIs shape what leaders choose to build. Portable KPIs travel through institutions like a mental map. Over time, the map becomes policy, and the institution begins to confuse the dashboard for reality. That is legibility capture.
Universities facing a demographic cliff are monetizing the perimeter through P3 deals, vendorized student life, and campus advertising. The hidden cost is cognitive: when interstitial spaces become attention surfaces, cross domain synthesis collapses quietly.
An employer had a Hall of Wisdom: a corridor of offices for retired engineers, a formal honor. When design cycles got thorny, we didn’t file tickets or schedule consults. We walked to visit our elders. Time and again.
Calls for AI safety are rarely answered with system engineering. They are translated into procurement, vendors, and compliance layers—moves that increase fragility instead of care.
When vendors capture demand but externalize failure, asymmetric incentives quietly produce fragility.
Michigan’s roads reveal what happens when public expertise migrates out and systems lose the capacity to correct themselves. They did not fail by accident or climate alone. They deteriorated as public expertise migrated, oversight weakened, and the system lost the ability to enforce quality.
Compressed system maps showing how incentives, signals, and structures actually move. Curated as they emerged.
A child’s drawing revealed something most systems obscure. Misaligned incentives quietly reshape work, culture, and infrastructure until drift becomes make-work and make-work becomes instability, not from malice, but from obedience to the wrong signals.