Writing
Essays, concepts, and working notes — newest first.
- NoteTalking about AI and everyday complexity at MOD. in AdelaideA talk at MOD. in Adelaide about how AI might change everyday expectations, what becomes possible to build, and who takes on the work of keeping it useful.
- NoteThe Repo as Delivery MechanismAn advisory mandate delivered through a private GitHub repository: what it changed about shared material, about the sessions, and what it foreshadows for services work.
- 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.