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
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Systems and Soul
The Broken Clock
A childhood lesson becomes a systems lesson: even unreliable sources contain truth if you know how to detect it. In a world of noise and low-signal systems, leadership depends on recognizing the moment something is right.