About
Who writes this and why.
This is a place for thoughts that needed somewhere to go.
I’m an engineer. I’ve spent my career building things and watching how the industry around me shifts — sometimes gradually, sometimes all at once. Lately the shifts are getting faster, and I find myself wanting to think through what that means. Writing is how I do that.
The posts here are mostly essays — one sustained argument each. They come back to a handful of preoccupations: how new technologies actually absorb into organizations, what structure does to strategy, where systems calcify around their founding conditions, what building something over a long time horizon feels like from inside. I read widely and pull in whatever seems useful — a Cold War strategist here, an economics paper there — not because I’m an expert in any of it, but because the interesting thinking about technology often lives outside technology. I’m more interested in being usefully wrong than confidently right.
A few essays to start with:
- Soft Landings — an airline loyalty program, an old economist’s framework, and what it feels like to watch two decades of accumulated belonging dissolve into a number in a database.
- The Absorption Gap — four scenarios for how AI gets absorbed into the real world, and why all four are happening at once. The clearest statement of what I think is happening right now.
- Against Prescription — a course on how companies actually live and die, a career that took a different path because of it, and a view of organizations that hasn’t let go since.
The essays are linked by recurring ideas — threads that run through the archive from different angles. The threads page lets you trace one.
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