Essays

We were promised four-hour weeks. We got always-on. A short history of a long broken promise, and the arithmetic nobody wanted to show their work on.

Algorithmic curation is editorial judgment with the byline removed. On the quiet politics of the scroll, and who gets to decide what counts as the day's news.

Default settings are policy. Nobody voted for them, and everybody lives under them. A field guide to the governance that happens in the settings menu.

Why everything feels like an emergency, and who profits from the adrenaline. A note on our own method: slow reading, and a refusal to mistake heat for light.

Convenience, it turns out, is a transfer of power dressed in the language of a favor. We trace one frictionless checkout through four companies and two jurisdictions.

Your neighbor's camera is also a municipal asset, a marketing dataset, and a witness that never sleeps. On the slow deputization of the front porch.

When an automated system makes a costly mistake, "glitch" is the word that absorbs the blame so that no one has to. On error as a governance strategy.

We used to choose what to read; now something chooses for us and calls it discovery. What happens to culture when taste is delegated to a model.

Software ate the product, and then the product ate ownership. A reckoning with the subscription as the dominant grammar of modern commerce.

Forty-one terms-of-service documents, one very long month. What we found was not a conspiracy, but something more durable: consent manufactured through exhaustion.

Somewhere, a number stands in for your reliability — assembled from signals you never consented to and cannot inspect. On the dashboards that quietly grade us.

The first essay of the project, in which we set out our one durable question and promise to keep asking it. Who benefits? It is rarely the one being asked.