jealousy
Jealousy Is Not What You Think
Jealousy has a bad reputation. It is usually treated as a moral flaw. But sometimes it is a clue. Let's look at jealousy, lust, and the relational field between the jellor and the jellee.
Madonna Demir
Madonna Demir writes at the intersection of systems and soul, where structures meet the human spirit. A global operations executive and essayist, she explores how modern life can be redesigned with clarity, compassion, and a bit of humor.
essays
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · Afroman, Audit, and the Duty to Repair
Afroman's case isn't just about freedom of speech, but also whether citizens may use art to audit public power, and whether the state has any duty to repair the damage it causes.
essays
Theater of Fragility
Layoff advice focuses on paperwork and WARN notices. But the earlier signs of institutional decay are subtler: staged abundance, thinning support, and value extraction. Learn to read the weather before the layoff notices arrive.
essays
A Fallow Season
A childhood cornfield explains a grown-up need: seasons of rebuilding. Career, relationships, information, body, each has its own soil, and each can be restored.
essays
Through the Fog
Fog at work is often structural. Here’s how to keep clarity, protect your attention, and decide what to keep feeding, and what to let go.
essays
The Three Regimes of System Failure
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.
systems in action
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · Forced Featurization: No Opt-Out, Defaults That Don’t Stay Off
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.
essays
Automation Isn’t Coming. It already happened, and we hid the evidence
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.
systems in action
SYSTEMS IN ACTION· Annoyance as Baseline, Subscriptions Everywhere
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.
essays
KPI Kingdoms and How They Fall
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.
systems in action
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · Campus Monetization: The Perimeter Play
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.
systems in action
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · The Hall of Wisdom
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.