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.
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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.
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 · 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.
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· 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.
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 · 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 · 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.
When AI Safety Becomes a Supply Chain
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.
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · When Vendorization Creates Fragility
When vendors capture demand but externalize failure, asymmetric incentives quietly produce fragility.
Capability Drift in Public Infrastructure
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.
Systems and Soul
Flow Diagrams
Compressed system maps showing how incentives, signals, and structures actually move. Curated as they emerged.
Systems and Soul
When Incentives Break the System
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.
systems in action
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · The Control Illusion: How Export Controls Create Shadow Chains and Destroy Containment
When traceability breaks, containment fails. This Systems-in-Action maps how well-intended safety controls quietly produce shadow supply chains and brittle failure paths—making systems harder to see, not safer to run.
Systems and Soul
When the Wheel Turns Itself
Driving is one of the last places where strangers cooperate in real time. As autonomous cars rise, we risk losing the daily practice of attention, generosity, and shared responsibility that once shaped civic life.
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SYSTEMS IN ACTION · Why LED Speed Signs Create New Hazards
Tennessee’s new LED speed-limit signs were meant to modernize safety. Instead, they break long-established cue structures and misalign with human perception, creating new hazards. A look at how dynamic interfaces fail when behavior and context remain static.
Systems and Soul
When the Factories Left
When Michigan’s factories left, something else moved in. This essay traces how industrial collapse, policy incentives, and institutional drift reshaped entire communities—and why incarceration became the default replacement industry in parts of the Midwest.
Systems and Soul
Children Play · The First Compass
Children follow delight long before adults learn to override their inner compass. This essay explores how early orientation is lost through fear, incentives, and noise — and how relearning delight can restore coherence in work, identity, and life.
SIA
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · Am I Stuck in a Bullshit Job?
A straight, unflinching look at bullshit jobs: why some roles drain you, why the system needs the theater, and how to spot the risks before your skills hollow out. A human-scaled guide to value, dignity, and the first step toward real work.
SIA
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · The Gen Z Stare
Gen Z grew up fluent in emotional labor; they know what it costs to perform enthusiasm on command, and if their wage doesn’t merit it, false cheer feels like a bridge too far.
SIA
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · Breaking the Frame
A real-world example of frame inversion. Cynthia recognized a dominance tactic, matched the pattern, and restored equilibrium in the room. A Systems-in-Action breakdown of how pattern recognition and structural fluency override intimidation.
SIA
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · Family Estrangement
Reconciliation often fails at the first move. Shame makes emotional outreach intolerable. This guide shows how small, functional steps reopen the path back. Systems-in-Action.
Systems and Soul
Integrating Demir’s Step 0 With Coleman’s Reconciliation Ladder: Pre-Contact Interventions in Family Estrangement for Clinicians
Most estrangement frameworks begin too late, assuming both sides can manage emotional contact. Shame and reactivity can block even skilled attempts. Demir Step 0 supplies the missing on-ramp sequence prior to use of Coleman’s reconciliation ladder.