Chico’s Corner
A janitor was still a janitor. He was also a poet. Good systems hold people accountable for the work they do while staying curious about who else they may be.
Latest
Cult of the Special
The Cult of the Special begins when "specialness" status is granted before any comparison. It flatters, protects ego, blocks root cause analysis, and turns recurring patterns into sacred exceptions.
When Heroics Beat Prevention
Organizations often reward visible rescue more than invisible prevention. A Systems & Soul essay on recognition failure, hero culture, operational competence, and why stable systems quietly become fragile.
The Private Life of Out-of-School Reading
Children need books they do not have to report. A reflection on comic books, free reading, school reward systems, and the private interior life where readers and future selves begin to form.
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.
The Dutch Hangplek and the Governance of Mischief
Communities keep asking why teenagers misbehave in malls. The Dutch hangplek answers why adolescent mischief needs legitimate civic infrastructure containers to prevent disorder.
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · The Handler
Most corrupt institutions have a handler, the role that preserves the institutional narratives over the truth. Handlers build plausible deniability in layers and keep corrupt arrangements alive by diffusing blame and protecting the inner circle.
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.
essays
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.
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.
future of work
Through the Fog
Fog at work is often structural. Here’s how to keep clarity, salvage your career, and decide what to keep and what to let go.
essays
The Three Regimes of System Failure
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.
work and retirement
SYSTEMS IN ACTION · The Hall of Wisdom
My former employer had a Hall of Wisdom: a corridor of offices for retired engineers, an honor and favorite perk. When design cycles got thorny, 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 produce fragility.