Essays on AI, software, and the world they're reshaping.
Mostly arguments about power, money, and attention — with notes on the systems I build in between. Grouped by what they are about; filter by stage for the date-ordered archive, or browse by topic.
SEEDLING Rough notes, still formingBUDDING Developing, partially revisedEVERGREEN Considered finished and maintained
Power & institutions
23What systems were actually built to do, as opposed to what they say they do.
- BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Audit Only Checks What It Can Reach
My own site published a number that was false while the correct number sat four lines below it, and the reason generalizes further than software. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Nostalgia Is a Political Weapon
The mythologized past that authoritarian movements promise to restore never existed, but the longing they exploit is real. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Prison System Isn't Broken
Mass incarceration looks like failure only until you ask what the system was built to do. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Public Libraries Are Radical
If someone proposed the public library today, free and open to everyone with no purchase required, they would be called a socialist. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Meritocracy Is a Fairy Tale
The word meritocracy was coined as satire, and we built an entire economic theology around the joke. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Healthcare Is Infrastructure
We treat healthcare like a consumer product when it functions like a road or a power grid. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Abolition Isn't What You Think
Abolition is not the absence of safety but the presence of something better than cages. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Borders Are Newer Than You Think
The modern border regime is barely a century old, and pretending otherwise distorts every immigration debate we have. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
How Socialists Won New York
How a DSA assemblyman beat Andrew Cuomo with 50,000 volunteers and no corporate money, and what it means for American politics. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
ICE Kills Americans
US citizens have been killed and deported by immigration enforcement. The machine doesn't care about papers. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Bureaucratic Violence
How 'just following protocol' diffuses responsibility until atrocities happen with nobody to blame. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Due Process Is Already Dead
Immigration enforcement already operates outside constitutional norms, and the exceptions it pioneered are spreading into the rest of the legal system. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Deportation Machine Has No Off Switch
Once built, enforcement systems don't stay confined to their original targets. Institutional momentum keeps the machine running. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Cruelty As Policy
Some policies hurt people on purpose, and the architects say so out loud when they think it polls well. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Why Reform Fails
You can't vote your way out of structural violence. The system is working as designed. A critique of reformism without nihilism. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The University Is a Credentialing Machine
Higher education stopped being about knowledge long ago. It's a sorting mechanism for employers, and the content is incidental to the credential. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Expertise Is a Social Relation
Someone can know something true and still not count as an expert. Expertise is competence plus recognition, and recognition is political. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Mutual Aid Isn't Charity
Charity flows downward and keeps hierarchy intact; mutual aid flows sideways and builds power instead. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Journalism Is Dead, Long Live Journalism
The business model that paid for newspapers collapsed, but the practice of reporting is harder to kill than the institution that housed it. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Rural America Isn't What You Think
The countryside isn't monolithically conservative. It's complicated, abandoned, and organizing in ways that defy stereotypes. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Bioregionalism: Thinking Like a Watershed
Political boundaries are arbitrary. Ecological ones aren't. What organizing politics around natural systems actually means. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
Actual Reformation
A look at what we as individuals must do to reform instead of more grandiose gestures that would only cause short-term fixes like electing a new president for example. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Automation Apocalypse That Wasn't (And What's Actually Happening)
Oxford predicted 47% of jobs at risk, and since then 16 million jobs were added; here is what the data on AI and automation actually shows.
Philosophy & the self
19Absurdism, attention to one’s own mind, and the stories we tell to live with both.
- BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Boredom Is a Skill
We engineered boredom out of existence and lost something we cannot get back from a screen. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Nihilism Is Lazy Philosophy
Nothing matters is the intellectual equivalent of not voting and it deserves the same respect. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Meditation Industrial Complex
How mindfulness got stripped from its Buddhist roots and sold back as a productivity hack for corporate America. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
You Don't Find Yourself
The 'finding yourself' narrative assumes a fixed self waiting to be discovered; the research says you build one, and keep rebuilding it. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Wu Wei and the Backwards Law
The harder you chase something, the more it evades you. Alan Watts' backwards law and the paradox of effortless action. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Against Optimization
You cannot life-hack your way to meaning, and the productivity industry is counting on you not noticing. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Attention Is Not a Resource
The 'attention economy' metaphor gets it wrong, and the error isn't academic. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Effort Without Striving
Working hard and trying hard look identical from the outside, and only one of them burns you out. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Loneliness Epidemic Is Structural
Loneliness isn't a personal failing. It's what happens when you design cities for cars instead of people. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Surrender Is Not Giving Up
Surrender and defeat get treated as the same word, and the confusion costs you the one move that actually works under pressure. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Taoist Case Against Hustle Culture
Hustle culture treats more force as more results, and a 2,500-year-old text already explained why that breaks. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Flow States Are Not Achievements
You can't grind your way into flow, and the harder you try to manufacture it the further off it gets. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Science Studies for People Who Like Science
The social construction of scientific facts doesn't make them less real. It makes the work that produced them more interesting. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Secular Society Isn't
We replaced church with other rituals. They're just less honest about what they are. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Liberation Theology Was Right
The radical tradition within Christianity that sided with the poor. What happens when religion takes material conditions seriously. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Meaning Isn't Optional
Humans require narrative. The question isn't whether you have a mythology, but which one. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
Nick Land: The Philosopher Who Became Explicitly Racist
Nick Land went from calling for feminist guerrilla war to advocating 'hyper-racism,' and the innovations of his early work don't excuse what he became. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
Bostrom's Simulation Argument Is Less Than You Think
Bostrom's trilemma is logically valid and empirically empty, and the real question is whether 'simulated' is even a meaningful category. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Psychology of Self-Deception: What Research Shows About Ego
Self-enhancement bias averages d=0.86, the Dunning-Kruger effect is misunderstood, and Terror Management Theory explains why ego threats feel like survival threats.
Money & work
16Labour, incentives, and the economic theology we mistake for physics.
- EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Rational Actor Is Dead
Homo economicus never existed but we still build policy like it does, and people keep getting hurt. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
UBI Isn't Radical Enough
Universal basic income has gone mainstream, and that should make you suspicious of what it leaves untouched. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
GDP Is a Terrible Measure of Progress
We have been steering the economy by staring at the wrong dashboard for sixty years. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Rent-Seeking Is Eating Everything
Most wealth in America is not created but extracted, and the economy is increasingly about controlling gates rather than building roads. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Nobody Is Self-Made
The self-made billionaire is a myth that serves a political function, and it is time to retire it. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Local Food Isn't Elitist
Local food looks expensive because industrial food is artificially cheap, and somebody is paying the hidden costs. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Why We Stopped Repairing Things
Your grandparents repaired everything. You throw everything away. This isn't a generational virtue difference. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Monero in 2026: Technical Advances Meet Regulatory Headwinds
Monero's cryptography keeps getting stronger while exchanges keep delisting it. Where that leaves an investor in 2026. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Cooperatives Actually Work
Worker-owned businesses survive longer, pay better, and don't require exploitation. The barriers are political, not economic. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Commons Never Left
Common-pool resources exist everywhere. We just stopped seeing them. The tragedy of the commons is a myth that served enclosure. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Degrowth Isn't Primitivism
You can have modern medicine and less stuff. Degrowth targets material throughput, not quality of life. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Strikes Work
Withholding labor is the most effective leverage workers have, which is exactly why so much effort goes into making strikes feel impossible. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Your Workplace Could Be Organized
What a union drive actually looks like, which is less dramatic and more possible than the picket-line version in your head. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Gig Economy Is Just Old Exploitation
Uber didn't invent precarity. It rebranded it. Piece-work with an app, dressed up as innovation. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Against Productivity Time
Clock-discipline is a three-hundred-year-old invention that we now mistake for a law of nature. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Empirical Case for 'Impractical' Majors
Philosophy majors now have lower unemployment than computer science graduates, and the salary gap reverses by age 40.
Technology & attention
18Building the systems, and being honest about what they do to the people inside them.
- EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
Silicon Valley's Death Problem
Transhumanism is terror management theory funded by venture capital, and it is telling on itself. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Your Smart Home Is a Landlord's Dream
Smart apartment tech is marketed as convenience for tenants and works as surveillance for landlords. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Right to Repair Is a Civil Right
You bought it but you don't own it. Repair restrictions aren't a consumer inconvenience; they're a property rights crisis. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
AI Art and the Death of Process
The debate about AI art focuses on output quality. That misses the point entirely. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Open Source Has a Sustainability Problem
The entire internet runs on software maintained by exhausted volunteers. That's not a feature; it's a crisis. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Quantified Self Is a Prison
We turned our bodies into dashboards and our lives into optimization problems. The numbers aren't setting us free. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Platform Feudalism
You don't own your digital life; you rent it from lords who can evict you at will, and that's a description of digital property relations rather than a metaphor. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Myth of the Neutral Tool
Technology embeds politics, and the design is the argument. No tool is a mere instrument; every one shapes what's possible and what's thinkable. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Self-Hosting Is Political
Running your own infrastructure is a small assertion of autonomy against platforms built to make autonomy impossible. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Algorithmic Culture
You don't choose what you see anymore; systems optimizing for engagement choose for you, and culture is bending to fit. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Feed Is the Problem
Infinite scroll isn't a feature. It's an extraction mechanism. The feed format itself, not just the content, is designed against human flourishing. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Code Walkthrough: React, CSS animations, and state management
A few working examples for React components, CSS animations, and state, written to be copied and broken. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
How I Built This Site: A Technical Deep Dive
The architecture and decisions behind lscaturchio.xyz, from Next.js 16 to RAG-powered search. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
When Machines Learned to See: A Century of Art and Technology in Conflict
From the camera obscura controversy to AI lawsuits in 2025, each wave of technological disruption has forced artists to confront what is irreplaceably human about creative expression. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
Building RAG Systems in Production
Simple RAG fails in production. Notes on what actually fixed it: hybrid retrieval, reranking, contextual chunking, and measuring before adding anything. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
Digital Minimalism Beyond the Hype
What the peer-reviewed evidence on intentional technology use actually supports, what it oversimplifies, and where it's still uncertain. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Software is Magic: Understanding Consciousness Through Computational Patterns
What it means to say your mind is software running on biological hardware, and why animists may have been pointing at something real. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Privacy in the Age of AI
Better AI usually wants more of your data, but the tradeoff isn't as fixed as it looks. What you can actually do about it, as a user and as a builder.
Place & climate
8Cities, water, community, and the physical substrate everything else sits on.
- EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Water Wars Are Already Here
Two billion people already lack reliable drinking water, and the conflicts over what's left are well underway. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Sports Are the Last Public Ritual
In a secular, atomized society, stadiums are one of the few places where strangers still cry together without irony. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Where Did Everybody Go?
Third places are disappearing because we priced out the conditions that made community happen for free. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Suburbs Are a Ponzi Scheme
Most American suburbs cannot pay for their own infrastructure. The math has never worked. We just kept building anyway. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Climate Change Is a Labor Issue
The workers who extract, transport, and burn fossil fuels are the same ones who'll build what comes next. Climate transition requires labor organizing. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Problem With Green Capitalism
You can't consume your way to sustainability, and the market that built the crisis won't be the thing that ends it. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Why Your City Is Expensive
Housing costs aren't natural market outcomes. They're policy choices defended by people who benefit from artificial scarcity. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Seasonal Living Isn't Nostalgia
Your body knows what season it is. Industrial society pretends it doesn't matter. It does.