Writing
Essays, concepts, and working notes — newest first.
- NoteThe Price of a ProtocolAn AI harness rests on protocols somebody already settled. Knowledge work has none, and settling them costs twice: in labour, and in authority handed over.
- EssayOsti, the Photocopier, and the Question MachineMassimo Osti's photocopier method as the frame for AI democratizing answers while doing nothing for questions; ends open on the complexity-affordance question.
- NoteIntrospection TaxThe disproportionate time, space, and attention cost of the self-articulation AI-augmented work demands, and the premium it creates for those who can pay it
- EssayWhat Kind of Complexity Should We Afford Ourselves?Cowan's More Work for Mother, turned on AI: appliances didn't save labor, they let us choose new complexity. Treat AI as a dishwasher, not a god.
- ConceptAgency DeficitOrganizations rarely suffer an information deficit. They lack the agency and time to act on what they already know. Applied right, that is where AI adds value.
- EssaySovereignty Is the Ground That Stays Under YouEurope keeps demanding AI sovereignty without naming a game it can win. Stop chasing a frontier champion. Compete for the open, local floor instead.
- ConceptLab RenaissanceThe return of the small, day-to-day-decoupled team — Lab or Center of Excellence — as the organizational-design answer to AI adoption.
- NoteContact Lenses for a HeadbandAgents collapsed the cost of joining data: a half-broken EEG headband experiment, and why noisy sensors now make every archive worth more.
- EssayNostalgia is not the wordGen Z's appetite for retro is not nostalgia. It is hauntology: longing for a future that was promised and never arrived. The nostalgia is the brands'.
- ConceptMemory as MediumThe thesis that memory — not content, not messages, not notes — becomes the central primitive for publishing, professional identity, and collaboration in AI-mediated knowledge work
- ConceptAgentic MemoryHow AI agents persist, structure, and manage memory — three philosophical camps, six analytical axes, and twenty-one systems mapped.
- ConceptThe Coordination AgentWhat happens when you give a multi-party project an AI team member with persistent memory across every tool and conversation.
- NoteAtmosphereA visualization of reasoning terrain — close to a thousand sessions rendered as a living nebula of colored gas.
- NoteShevA personal observer agent that watches how I think across conversations — named after Shevek from Le Guin's The Dispossessed.
- EssayBrain Dead — How I Built an AI-Operated Knowledge VaultArchitecture, data model, and decisions behind an Obsidian vault where AI agents do most of the writing.