Blog Series
Multi-part deep dives into complex topics. Follow along as we explore ideas in depth.
The Carceral State
8 parts · 40 min total
The Prison System Isn't Broken
Mass incarceration looks like failure only until you ask what the system was built to do.
Cruelty As Policy
Some policies hurt people on purpose, and the architects say so out loud when they think it polls well.
Borders Are Newer Than You Think
The modern border regime is barely a century old, and pretending otherwise distorts every immigration debate we have.
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.
ICE Kills Americans
US citizens have been killed and deported by immigration enforcement. The machine doesn't care about papers.
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.
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.
Abolition Isn't What You Think
Abolition is not the absence of safety but the presence of something better than cages.
The Attention Economy
5 parts · 25 min total
Attention Is Not a Resource
The 'attention economy' metaphor gets it wrong, and the error isn't academic.
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.
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.
Boredom Is a Skill
We engineered boredom out of existence and lost something we cannot get back from a screen.
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.
Cities and Belonging
5 parts · 25 min total
Suburbs Are a Ponzi Scheme
Most American suburbs cannot pay for their own infrastructure. The math has never worked. We just kept building anyway.
Why Your City Is Expensive
Housing costs aren't natural market outcomes. They're policy choices defended by people who benefit from artificial scarcity.
Where Did Everybody Go?
Third places are disappearing because we priced out the conditions that made community happen for free.
The Loneliness Epidemic Is Structural
Loneliness isn't a personal failing. It's what happens when you design cities for cars instead of people.
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.
Effortless Action
5 parts · 25 min total
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.
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.
Effort Without Striving
Working hard and trying hard look identical from the outside, and only one of them burns you out.
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.
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.
Labor and Organizing
5 parts · 25 min total
The Gig Economy Is Just Old Exploitation
Uber didn't invent precarity. It rebranded it. Piece-work with an app, dressed up as innovation.
Strikes Work
Withholding labor is the most effective leverage workers have, which is exactly why so much effort goes into making strikes feel impossible.
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.
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.
Cooperatives Actually Work
Worker-owned businesses survive longer, pay better, and don't require exploitation. The barriers are political, not economic.
Repair
2 parts · 10 min total
AI and Society
2 parts · 10 min total
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.
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.
Philosophy of Mind
2 parts · 10 min total
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.
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.
