The Day We Used to Dance
May 1 was a fire and a maypole long before it was a slogan. The eight-hour workday demand asked for three blocks of time. Two got walls around them. The third quietly slipped through the calendar and ended up somewhere else.
Notes
I write about the overlooked, the contradictory, and the quietly absurd.
Short essays on design, technology, and the cultural habits that don't quite fit a hot take. Some are field notes from Montreal, some are arguments I've been having with myself for a while. Each carries a short summary, a reading time, and a handful of related reads.
Longer essays go on Medium.
Not much of a reader? Listen to my notes on the podcast.
The Headline That Ate the Story
Moby Dick gets retitled as 'How One Man's Obsession with a Whale Destroyed His Crew'. The grammar is older than the algorithm, lifted from grocery-aisle paperbacks decades before the recommendation feed showed up. The feed only taught us, slowly, that the templates work.
The Book That Talks Back
A toddler swipes a paperback and waits for it to do something. Across the room, an adult thanks the language model and apologises for a typo. Two category errors in opposite directions, and the second one is becoming harder to see.
The Data That Flatters
A soccer club spends a decade building the most expensive analytics department in its history and ends up in a relegation fight with a roster full of sprinters who cannot pass. The numbers were never the problem.
The Burger That Benchmarks Everything
A monthly design subscription costs the same in San Francisco as in Sarajevo, but the dollar does not. A famous sandwich index was built to measure that gap, and regional software pricing quietly tried to answer it, until users acted on the logic and the companies pulled it back.
The Chairman Declines the Funding
You slide the contract back. The men in fleece vests look at it like unfamiliar fruit. What a socialist startup does when venture capital shows up.
The Work Survives the Maker
Trotsky wrote one of the sharpest portraits of New York in 1917. Can valuable work come from a source you would otherwise reject?
The Part Nobody Designed For
Haptics shift how buttons feel. Colour and scent shape decisions. The emotional layer of interfaces was never in the spec but always in the experience.
The Alarm That Never Learns
Every generation fears new tech will ruin the next. From Socrates on writing to the 1916 push button, the alarm rarely predicts what actually gets lost.
The Humans Have Left the Building
Public forums emptied out while bots moved in. The last genuine argument, the last mind actually changed, nobody marked the moment the room went quiet.
The Efficiency of Being Inefficient
Ordering coffee from a screen while a barista stands right there. Silicon Valley declared friction the enemy. It never asked what friction was doing for us.
The Pre-Existential Crisis Hierarchy
A meme ranks existential dread by ocean depth. Surface gentle, bottom quantum immortality. The scariest ideas aren't at the bottom. They hide in plain sight.
The Performance of Not Performing
Creators build audiences by showing the same jacket twice and mending jeans. The algorithm now rewards its opposite. Not selling is the new pitch.
The Eternal Reinvention Tax
Designers bring dissertation-bound case studies to interviews. Engineers write 'software engineer' on LinkedIn. Why one field keeps rewriting itself.
The Friendship We Outgrew
Scrolling past friends creates an illusion of closeness while masking growing distance. Why modern friendships end in silence instead of a fight.
The Triple Self
Life sim players craft virtual influencer personas, critiquing and reinventing digital identity in an era where authenticity is its own performance.
The Memory We Become
What if true existence isn't the present moment you live, but the memory of you that others carry forward? An inversion on how we think about living.
The Chat Room We Lost
The internet moved from communal chat rooms to curated self-expression. Why it stopped being a place you meet strangers and became a place you perform for them.
The Promotion Nobody Wanted
Tech startup reviews keep saying the same thing: no direction, endless pivots, misunderstood priorities. Promoting builders to management keeps breaking them.
The Checkpoint, Not the Destination
The blank page isn't lack of ideas. It's doubt about their worth. Writing from the middle of learning instead of waiting for a finish line that never arrives.