The Demon Denominator
False efficiency begins when systems measure the wrong unit. The Demon Denominator explains how cost savings, make-work, and design failures hide inside bad denominators.
Latest
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · The Dutch Hangplek and the Governance of Mischief
American communities keep asking why teenagers gather badly in malls. The Dutch hangplek answers a better question: where are teenagers allowed to gather at all? Why adolescent mischief needs legitimate civic containers before it becomes disorder.
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · The Handler
Most corrupt institutions have a handler, the role that preserves the story over the truth. This Systems-in-Action maps how handlers build plausible deniability in layers and keep corrupt arrangements alive.
Snakes, Summers, and Willow Whip Tag
From willow whip tag and haylofts to a corn snake on a New York metrobus, a small-town girlhood returns in one strange, calm moment of recognition.
When Age Changes but Power Doesn't
Bloomberg says CEO age is rising. But age is just the easiest variable to narrate as change. Gender tells the harder story: power remains overwhelmingly male.
Unfawning
What if fawning is not only a trauma response, but one of the ordinary disciplines of modern life, trained early, rewarded often, and mistaken for maturity?
Jealousy Is Not What You Think
Jealousy is usually treated as a moral flaw. But sometimes it is a clue. This essay looks at lust, status desire, and the relational field between the jellor and the jellee.
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.
Theater of Fragility
When companies perform optics over integrity, they perform quasi-abundance. Substance has been replaced by staging; substitutions abound. To detect a company has begun substituting appearance for substance, extraction for stewardship, and dependence for resilience, look for these fragility signals.
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.
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
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, 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.
Systems and Soul
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.
SIA
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · When Vendorization Creates Fragility
When vendors capture demand but externalize failure, asymmetric incentives quietly produce fragility.
systems
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 move through human systems. Grounded in Convivial Systems Theory. 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.