Tag: Technology and Systems
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Intelligence Too Cheap to Meter – Part I
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all by the disenchantment of the world ~ Max Weber, Science as a Vocation Intelligence too cheap to meter. The phrase is…
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V : Power
Power is usually described in moral language. It is called good, corrupting, legitimate, or abusive. It is also described in expressive terms as the ability to change the world or show the world who someone…
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Stories From My life
Over the past two years, I have written about power, ambition, incentives, and the ways technology reshapes how we think and behave, but the personal experiences behind those ideas rarely made it onto the page.…
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III : Incentives
People often explain behavior in terms of beliefs, values, or intentions. Those things matter, but they are rarely decisive. What people actually do, especially over time and at scale, follows incentives more reliably than what…
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I : Maintenance
People like starting things. They like building, launching, fixing, and improving. Maintenance doesn’t feel like any of that. When maintenance is done well, nothing happens. Things keep working. That makes it easy to ignore. Most…
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VII : Rebuilding the Architecture of Meaning
The collapse of inherited defaults did not merely unsettle individuals. It reshaped the architecture of modern life. What once oriented people through shared narratives, rituals, and institutions dissolved under the pressures of autonomy, pluralism, and…
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IV : The Algorithmic Default
When the scaffolding of inherited life collapsed, we were left to improvise our way through the open field of possibility. Post III explored the psychic cost of that improvisation: choice overload, fragmentation, self-surveillance, the quiet…
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II : The Race for Coherence
I keep finding myself coming back to the same feeling I had while writing the first essay. Acceleration doesn’t just change how we live; it changes what we compete for. In earlier centuries, power was…
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II : The Fall of the Default
If The Age of the Default gave people ready-made maps, traditions that told you who you were, what mattered, and where you belonged, the fall of the default begins the moment those maps stop matching…
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I : The Architecture of Coherence
I keep thinking about a story from a few years ago about an AI program that sat for a law exam and passed. It shouldn’t have mattered, really. Just another piece of tech news that…