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Digital Architecture — On our digital personhood

• [article] Hydraulic Despotism — 1 Dec 2025
  Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
• [article] AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing — 1 Nov 2025
  Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generating rational ones. AI is fundamentally this but crippled: without the grounded intuitions and social friction that makes it work.
• [article] AI is never human-like — 14 Mar 2025
  AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different <em>values</em> for than environment, and until all three align, they will never <em>actually</em> be human-like.
• [article] It's not social media, life is just worse — 2 Aug 2024
  Social media use probably isn’t the problem. Social media use is probably just the most obvious manifestation of lots of problems. And in fact, social media could probably be a solution. It’s up to you.
• [article] AI isn't that scary — 22 Jun 2024
  AI alarmism thrives on speculative, worst-case scenarios, but our understanding of AI’s fundamentally alien nature and the complex forms of consciousness make me suspect that less stressful alternatives are equally plausible.
• [article] Malcolm Gladwell Shit — 14 Feb 2023
  The most successful facts about the world are the ones that subvert our weakly held beliefs. They look like they’re about improvement, but they’re more often simply entertainment dressed up like education.
• [article] Everything is Choice Architecture — 12 Jan 2023
  Nudging doesn’t work because people aren’t thinking hard enough. Everything is choice architecture, so look to the way you build things in the first place or turn to our deepest motivations—our communities.
• [article] Amusing Ourselves to Death — 21 Sep 2021
  Since the invention of the telegraph, information has become increasingly atomized, incoherent, and irrelevant. Our media technology encourages entertainment, not discourse. Information ‘from nowhere’, ‘to no one’ about which we can do nothing. We don’t have to lean in.
• [article] Server 101: A Digital Foundation — 27 Feb 2021
  A simple set up that allows us to access our files and stream media from our PC, our phone, and wherever else we might want them. No one owns them but us. If anything goes wrong, it can be replaced easily. And most importantly, we’ll have control over our digital self in a way that it deserves.
• [article] Server 102: Access Everywhere — 27 Feb 2021
  A simple that allows us to access our files and stream media from our PC, our phone, and wherever else we might want them. No one owns them but us. If anything goes wrong, it can be replaced easily. And most importantly, we’ll have control over our digital self in a way that it deserves.
• [article] The predictability of humans — 15 Sep 2020
  The human animal is an animal first–responding adaptively to the environment around it. Humans are only unpredictable because we’re obsessed with the human mind and uncomfortable accepting how influential our environment is.
• [article] What use is the cloud — 9 Sep 2020
  Using the cloud and a couple of harddrives to sort our files out.
• [article] Creating a digital home for our digital selves — 6 Sep 2020
  Our digital lives are as much an entity as our physical lives. Maybe moreso—many of us spend more time online than off. Yet we take very little care of our digital selves. We’re going to fix that. Simply. Because it causes us more stress than it needs to.