How democratic societies can govern concentrated power—without governing everyone Modern democracy has a scaling problem. Power concentrates faster than institutions can observe, understand, or constrain it. Citizens can see outcomes—higher rents, captured markets, political paralysis—but not the control structures producing them. Enforcement lags. Complexity wins. Oligarchs don’
The wheel was introduced on a Tuesday. This was a procedural error. Tuesdays were for mammoth accounting, grievance sharing, and the ceremonial revisiting of injuries that were technically healed but emotionally unfinished. New ideas were reserved for Thursdays, when people were fed, rested, and marginally curious. Urg knew this. He
Theo Vance took his standing ovation like oxygen. He stood center stage beneath a white special calibrated to flatter bone structure and absolve doubt. Six rows of donors, critics, and professional noticers applauded in practiced rhythm. “I’ll say just one thing,” Theo said, and didn’t. “They keep asking
The future arrived—AI everywhere, apps for everything, a phone that knows your sleep cycle better than your spouse—and a meaningful slice of the population responded by… buying a tiny kitchen TV and a corded landline. Architectural Digest recently documented the aesthetic: VHS/DVD stacks, corded phones, under-cabinet CD
Light pushed through the thin curtains in a pale sheet, touching the edge of the dresser, the framed photographs, the chipped glass of the bedside lamp. The old woman in the bed took her time noticing. At ninety-nine, waking counted as an accomplishment. There was no sense rushing to the
The real AI frontier isn’t smarter models. It’s dumber models you control. SLMs won’t just cut costs. They’ll fracture the surveillance economy — if you build the stack right. 🧠 Context: The Cloud‑LLM Trap & the Privacy Illusion The default pattern today: you type text → it hits
SLMs are eating AI from the edge inward — not because they beat GPT‑4 at everything, but because they out‑integrate: fast, cheap, local. They turn AI from a mainframe‑style service into a pervasive middleware. 🧠 Context: The Scale Trap The prevailing narrative in AI is scale worship: more parameters,
The first time the song falters, Jonah is twenty-nine and still optimistic enough to believe in fresh starts. He’s in the garage, wearing shoes he bought to “change everything,” a phrase he’s already used too many times. He hits play. Hold on, I’m co— The power flickers.
Compliance, Logic & Resolution Assistant A System/1 Short Story I. THE REASON THE CITY BROKE UP WITH HUMANS The problem began with Karen Divine, age fifty-six, clerk of records, believer in Christ, Costco sheet cakes, and the unshakable moral truth that the Lord did not approve of Adobe PDF
The expo smelled like melting carpet and ambition. Providence had converted an old hockey arena into a “Climate, Culture, and Emotional Infrastructure Showcase,” which meant the sponsors were startups with names like Empathix, HeartWare, and FeelGrid—firms determined to algorithmically map the parts of human life they least understood. The
How Technology Made Life Better, Broke a Few Things, and What We Refuse to Lose Human life looks like a split-screen now. On one side: 1985. A worker in a polyester tie inching down Highway 41, talk radio fuzzing through the dash. Paper forms stacked on every flat surface. Smoke
Human irrationality was always dangerous. Quantifying it was worse. __ The Sentiment Map looked calm enough to medicate a continent. Fifty states, thousands of cities, all tiled across the wall-size display. Each block pulsed in slow gradients tied to eight indices: anger, fear, calm, anticipation, fatigue, cohesion, tribalization, volatility. The colors