Spaceships, Flying Cars, and HAL
Hollywood predicted all three. Only one showed up.
The journal · Theme
Friction & agency
Which effort to remove, which to protect, and who gets to choose. 15 essays, newest first.
We Optimized the Wrong Thing: People Need the Inconvenience
Why friction, effort, and a little difficulty might be exactly what we've been designing out of our lives.
An Algorithm Walks Into a Bar: My thoughts on FirstDate.
Singapore's new dating pilot treats matching as the problem. What has gone missing are the rooms where people practiced meeting, failing and becoming good company.
AI is taking over the status meeting. The hours left over belong to long, side-by-side conversations, like a walk through a park in Bucharest with a man I'd met an hour earlier.
I built this website by pressing approve, over and over. AI is turning operators into governors who authorize work they don't fully understand.
A failed search in a bookstore ended in a book I never meant to buy. Being predicted and being encountered are different experiences, and algorithms only offer the first.
Bradbury, Proust and a sleepless night. AI should take the friction out of production and leave the hard part, working out what the thing should be.
AI closes the gap between junior and senior output while the gap in judgment stays open. Use it as scaffolding, or the pipeline of experienced people runs dry.
Do Not Underestimate Your Place in History Right Now
Earlier technologies changed how things reached us. This one takes part in how we think, and history will judge us on whether we stayed awake while it did.
Bad Work Is Fine. Public Bad Work Is Not.
Slop isn't new. What's new is that first drafts now go straight to the public, and taste depends on knowing what to keep in the drawer.
On reclaiming meaning, momentum, and attention in a world that keeps asking for more.
Messy, Honest, Human: The Strategic Power of Reddit
Anonymity, friction and a total lack of polish make Reddit the most honest research tool a strategist has. It runs the Five Whys at the scale of a culture.
But Everything Important Happens When We’re Awake.
Are We Human, or Are We Prompting?
The Killers asked the question first. Formulaic prompting turns us into performers for the machine, and the machine starts training us back.
The Game We Think We’re Playing: AI, Creativity, and the Illusion of Control
“If you want to get the English interested in a war, you have to tell them it’s a game”. - Orwell